#Basira now works at the Institute (god help her)
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“Your will is still your own. Mostly.”
#the magnus archives#tma podcast#mag 92#jonathan sims#elias bouchard#!!!!!!?!?!??????!!???#HELLO?????????#HIIII????????????#OMG??????????????#also!!!! the famed ‘Elias am I still human’ quote!!!!!!!!#but a lot of stuff going on this ep omg#Basira now works at the Institute (god help her)#Elias being a murderer is open info now#Daisy’s gonna have to. hunt? for Elias#a lot going on!!!!!!#Jon needs to get better at seeing…..#and he can proper compel people?????#that’s sooooo cool!!!!!!!!
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magnus protocol episode 26 ramble
the academic victim era continues. i like putting my lil personal bits at the beginning of these i think it humanizes me
ok. i have to pause mid intro song. i just hit my bowl of snap pea crisps and spilled them everywhere and i'm going to tweak
3 of them fell on the floor.. but they're kinda expensive so we don't get to have them very often.. is it worth it..
i ate them i don't care
this has become more about me than the episode i'm gonna unpause it now
we're so back
celia at work core!! she dgaf!!!
MEET HELEN. pls don't be a tory in this universe pls pls pls pls. i didn't fw human helen at all i am less excited than i was about basira but also basira was one of my all time favs forever
hiii aliceeee <333
magnusing is so me tbh if you think about it
so does alice's voice have a slight hint of that effect they use for chester and norris to anyone else or.. like she sounds computer-y and i don't know if it's just the microphone or something real
"take protection" "jesus christ!" "LIKE A BIG KNIFE OR SOMETHING" CRYING. see my mind didn't go there sam so what's up with that sam huh sam
the hell does celia have in her workbag wtf. queen what. it's the trauma "are you sure that thing is legal?" LMFAOOOOOO
ok i don't like you saying nauseas because i'm on TWO medications that make me nauseas and i just ate pls don't be gross
DAMN. i was gonna be like JARED? HOPWORTH? but it's jared 'smith.' gerard jared is kind of like michael
P.E. teachers creep me out but probably because the only one my high school has ever officially had got fired my freshman year for spanking girls in the locker room and they never actually replaced him they just had various sports coaches take over
yea this is freaking me out already i don't like it
oh that's so sad the dad fucking died poor kid omg
wtf was he possessed by the soul of cross country. what is the horror here. ohh running for his life ok thanks
oh so the horror isn't mr jared it's what happens to him i guess. sorry man i shouldn't have called you creepy
this is just how my friends describe morning cross country practice
yeah so i was right to quit cross country in 5th grade then!!! running IS the horror!!!!
NOT THE TAPE RECORDER WTFFFFF IS THIS ERROR. ANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN ARCHIVIST.............................................................................................................................................................................................
AT A LOSS AT A LOSS AT A LOSS AT AT AT. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT
we were right guyss it's an archivist...
IT SAID ARCHIVIST ALICE YES LOCK IN QUEEN LOCK IN SHE'S SOOOOOOOO HEHEHE SHE'S SO SMART I'M IN LOVE WITH U
yes alice connect those dots!!! connect them babe!!!!! i'm scared though to be honest with you
SHE DOESN'T THINK SHE KNOWS DUMBASS. PLEASE LISTEN TO HER OR I'M WRITING ANOTHER HATE POST ABOUT YOU. oh thank you sam i don't hate you
HOW I WOULD'VE EXPECTED HOW I WOULD'VE EXPECTED hey helen
has celia shut down. oh my god she sounds really scared. probably because helen tried to eat her in another universe.
CELIA'S SO SCARED HONEYYYYYYY. wait now she's bringing up the magnus institute LMAOO
bloody big basement lmao it's where they keep the bodies
at least 20 years? it burned down 20 years ago? who's reaching out after it burned what
HELEN'S LAUGH MADE ME JUMP LMFAOOOOO HELP
SAM MEETING JACK???? SAM MEETING JACK??????? THEY'RE SO CUTE WTF OMG ur baby's a tory HAHA
celia you are being watched honeyyy you are you need to connect some dots. alice style. obsessed with her.
calling her baby goblin after that baby episode that celia was mentioned by name in hello. hello.
ok sam let's go no longer being as selfish thanks sam.
awe that's adorable i actually think he's been really nice lately holy shit.
LMAOOO WHY DID WE GET AN AUDIBLE KISS ON EPISODE 26 I THOUGHT THEY DIDN'T LIKE THOSE
#fen blogs tmagp#sam is climbing back up the liked list#i never hated him but i was strongly disliking him for a while#he was cute today though#also alice ilysm#gwen ilysm#i just love women guys#the magnus protocol#tmagp#magnus protocol#tmagp spoilers#tmagp 26
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Hi!! I went back to my notes. I need to scratch that itch in my brain (writing down information) anyways, WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERES A 15TH ENTITY?????
Mag 134: Time of Revelation
As you can tell from my above comment, I am very surprised. How was I supposed to know. The Extinction. Again, killer name. Is that what's going to be the main villain of this season? Thats what it feels like so far. Also, interesting The Web and The End never tried a ritual. Plus, the idea of The Extinction wiping us out to replace us with another race to fear it in return. Thats cool. But that makes me think are we like part of the cycle? Was there a race before us but then they got wiped out. I guess not because The Extinction is a newer entity. Okay ignore that
One thing that's been bouncing around my brain is like..if any rituals worked. Like these entities have been around for I dunno since fear was possible I guess. Rituals, while they take centuries to set up, would be pretty common to succeed so I'm just wondering if any entity succeeded in a ritual that led to the world now.
I still don't like Peter. "Hopefully our patron" SHUT UP. Also love that Martin helped out Jon with all those recorders. Because Jon can sense them. though I guess he didn't know that
MAG 135: Dark Matter
The last of the trio of statements (MAG 57, MAG 106). I did point out that in MAG 106, her fingertips were burned. I guess its because she handled a god damn SUN. A DARK SUN?? Anyways Maxwell Rayner appearance, woo. Also, an explanation behind Daedalus which i throughly enjoyed. Although the part about the nyctophobe being used as a battery did make me genuinely sick to my stomach. Dunno why that was the most unnerving part of this podcast to me.
Anyways, a ritual for The Dark. Took them a while, like a solid 4 years. in Norway too. Home of Jurgen leitner. You would think killing Rayner would stop them but no! Cant be that hard to end their ritual, just point a flashlight at them
MAG 136: The Puppeteer
I love seeing different perspectives to the same story oh my god. Anyways this is related to MAG 110, obviously. I wonder if neil lagorio knew about..The Web from the beginning. Was he in cahoots? They said he would send people to watch previews of his movies and they were never the same so i feel like he was. Plus he was described with no warmth behind his eyes and that sounds very not human so.
Annabelle Cain. She popped up before in MAG 69. Nice to see she's branching off to other hobbies like killing old men. I think she killed him at least. And now that were talking about her, I'm reminded of Jons zippo lighter with the web design. Did she somehow send it? Because that zippo lighter was given to him in like s1 and it hasn't been used for any plot important stuff and I'm getting antsy over it, who sent it, I swear to god. Chekhov's Lighter.
Also, "there's me, Melanie, Basira-" "Traumatized, traumatized, paranoid" that is the funniest thing wtf. Another thing, I am very worried about Melanies therapist. like very. Melanie please be careful girl
MAG 137: nemesis
War statements always make me feel bad. So Wallis Turner gave this statement at the Pu Songling Research Centre (MAG 105) which is yknow the sister institute. I wonder if they serve The Eye as well. Anyways "Nemesis" appeared before in MAG 105. Im guessing the entity related to this is The Slaughter. Crazy their ritual failed, those losers. The Risen War. God why are all the names so cool.
ALSO, Eric. What did Gertrude mean about telling gerry about following in his dads footsteps? I checked my notes and in Mary Keays statement, it's implied Eric serves The End. At least that's what I got. he did get a gruesome end. Sorry.
I think that's everything. I see the next statement is Robert Smirke, oh my god. I need to know what this insane architect was up to, I'm so excited.
#the magnus archives#tma#tma s4#tma podcast#zabala0z thoughts#low-key missed my notes#Im not going to write down all the details from every episode like I did before#Know when I had free time and stuff. But I will write down connections I notice#My shitty brain kinda needs it#Anyways#Still hate Peter Lukas#And Elias#My two least favorite characters#now make them kiss
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Mag 43
[Waves like an overexcited mum seeing her child in a school play] Hi Basira!!!!!!
What struck me most about this episode for this relisten was how quickly Jon and Basira seemed to click with each other. These two were on each other's level from the first few lines.
More information about how the Institute works! Makes snese that they'd have thorough policies in place for information control, and cool that Jon is apparently good enough at his job by now to be familiar with correct procedure off the top of his head.
Look at how much effort Jon is going through to reassure her and help her feel comfortable giving her statement! This is such a far cry from his behaviour during every previous live statement he's ever taken. Took him long enough, but I guess he's finally decided to be more lovely.
Look at this! An attempt at levity! This is basically banter. Maybe Tim isn't way off base for thinking these two had something going on. This is definitely the most pleasant Jon has ever been with a statement-giver that wasn't one of his employees.
Always so great when the Archivist switches into statement mode and the statement-giver is like '...wtf do you want me to do now.'
Love this in terms of world-building. There are people who know about the supernatural and basically have the job of sweeping as much of it as possible under the rug, but don't expect them to know what's going on because they don't get told anything more than anyone else ever does.
At some point I'll have to put together a larger post about way that various institutions in the world must have been effected by the presence of the Entites, because its an aspect of the worldbuilding of TMA that is endlessly fascinating to me. Really hope this is something we get some new angles on in TMAGP.
I know a lot of people had issues with the portrayal of law enforcement (and Daisy and Basira's arcs specifically) in TMA and I don't intend to dive super deep into it, mostly because I'm a white woman who has never had any significant interaction with law enforcement, so I probably don't have anything particularly insightful to offer. All I'll say for now is that I think the series does a better job of saying ACAB than some people give it credit for, and we can see that in moments like this that explore 'us versus them' mentality within the cops (especially from the POV of Basira, who has her own issues with black and white morality and loyalty versus ethics).
I really can't imagine Basira being thrown by any amount of weirdness. Do we ever see her lose her composure over supernatural shit?
God Molina's such a fucking moron. What was his plan here? Just walk away from the fire dipshit, don't hang out raving like a lunatic and getting into fistfights.
Haha, Basira is the kind of person who takes welding classes on a whim. She's going to fit in so well with all the autism/ADHD girlies in the Archives.
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MAG 92 - baking apple pie
HOLD ON! Is that operator and Chief Inspector Hannah "Laura Popham/Jane Prentiss/Rosie Zampano" Brankin and the officer on the phone Alexander J"ared Hopworth/Martin Blackwood" Newall??? The operator sounds fairly clearly and the officer just sounds like Alex disguising his voice to sound deeper (or it's just edited like with Jared). Not so sure about the Chief Inspector. It lists both of them as additional voices, so it's possible?
"My dear Jonah" - ¬‿¬
"I know that what is done by those I cannot see might be felt here" - clever, using a place of Beholding to uncover those turned invisible by the fog. So… Did Barnabas know what the Institute was? What Jonah could do?
ELIAS "No, it was because he was curious. Because he had to know, to watch and see it all. That’s what this place is, John, never forget it. You may believe yourself to have friends, to have confidantes, but in the end, all they are is something for you to watch, to know, and ultimately to discard. This, at least, Gertrude understood." - Jon did better! Jon tried to help and save every single one of them! And in the end, exactly this was his doom to become the Archive. Gertrude did let all her assistants die, let others do the dirty and deadly work, which prevented her to get marked be all the fears.
MARTIN "Uh, sorry to interrupt, er, J-Jon’s here!" - Awww, he sounds so happy about this!
ELIAS "Goodness, Jon. Whatever happened to your hand? And your neck?" - Letting us know that the blunt knife did actually do some damage. Also Elias sounds so bored here. I mean, of course he Knew what happened, but usually he puts in a bit more effort to sound surprised or concerned.
JON [Chuckles] "I’ve had a hell of a week." - Yeah you did. On this day Jon got marked by the Vast and the Hunt. And just 4 days ago he got marked by the Desolation. (It is a Friday btw. and he met Jude on Monday.)
DAISY "Before I strangle the grinning bastard." - Letting us know, that Elias finds this whole situation amusing…
Oh yes, the static's pretty loud when Jon consciously compels someone.
Even though Elias sounds amused about the feeling of the compulsion, he also sounds like it takes a bit of effort to resist it.
ELIAS "There’s so much of this place, of ourselves, twisted by forces far beyond us. I just wanted you to know –" - Okay, was he about to talk about the Web? Since he wanted the others to know that he was not controlled and acted of his own free will. And conveniently in this moment Martin retrieved the others and interrupts him! Another Web!Martin moment!
BASIRA "Ah… Oh, god! And you killed him? You sure we shouldn’t be giving him a medal?" - Lol. Nobody liked Leitner xD At least his reputation.
God, the others finding out what really happened to Sasha… Martin and Tim I mean, I guess Jon already told Melanie.
ELIAS "Precisely. It finally tried to kill John. Then Leitner killed it. Then I killed Leitner." - THIS is a huge clue that Elias can't see what happens inside the tunnels! He couldn't see what actually happened to the Not!Them and he also couldn't hear Leitner (because of his A Disapprearance tho) when he told Jon that he entombed it.
Ben makes such a good villain! That chuckle when he phone rings!
ELIAS "No, there are plenty of other rabid dogs out there, mad with the hunt." - Smirke'ian name of the Hunt first time drop!
Martin doubting the police would do something like this reminds me of that The Fresh Prince of Bel Air's episode where Carlton thinks the police was only "doing their job" when they stopped him and Will and threw them in jail. That naiveté of disbelief that people wouldn't take advantage of their power.
ELIAS "Basira is now tied to the Institute. All of you are. Like fingers on a hand. And I am the beating heart of it. Should I, or the Institute, be destroyed, you will all, unfortunately, follow suit." - When I was first listening to this I stormed out of the kitchen to the group of friends staying at our place (because we would go on vacation together the next day) and babbled something incoherent to them about OMG THEY CAN'T LEAVE OR THEY'LL ALL DIE!!!
ELIAS "To offer some congratulations. You’re doing a lot better than I expected." JON "Feels like all I’ve managed to do is… not die." ELIAS "And believe me, that is a remarkably rare skill." - It's kind of true. All Elias needed was for Jon not to die. Yet.
ELIAS "The easily-digestible sort that wipe away any doubt and fear, and neatly organise your new world into happy little" - DOORBELLS!
ELIAS "These are things you must discover on your own." - This and with his explanation of Leitner "Telling Jon too much too soon!!!" I thought was a bad excuse. Turns out later, it was and it was intended! It was just an excuse to get Jon marked. Something I first considered lazy writing suddenly turned into brilliant writing!
ELIAS "Precisely. It is your job to chronicle these things, to experience them, whether first-hand or through the eyes of others" - Jon theater-kid explanation.
JON "I never chose this." ELIAS "You never wanted this, no. But I’m afraid you absolutely did choose it. In a hundred ways, at a hundred thresholds, you pressed on. You sought knowledge relentlessly, and you always chose to see. Our world is made of choices, John, and very rarely do we truly know what any of them mean, but we make them nonetheless." - Elias kinda gaslighting Jon here? How can it be choice if we don't know, what it means. When we don't even know there was a choice. That's kind of a philosophical question here that everyone can see differently… Also door motif!
ELIAS "I could. But I believe that if I did so, you would fail. The Stranger is antithetical to us. We thrive on ceaseless watching, on knowing too much. What we face is the hidden, the uncanny, and the unknown. If you are to stop them, you need to get better at seeing." - Ok that one actually does make sense. But I believe that in this instance Elias was also genuine and not making excuses to get Jon marked. Not directly at least. He needs him to survive death.
The explanation of the Unknowing, what it is and does was also pretty mind-blowing for me the first time listening.
Jon lingering to ask if he's still human is so sad…
Even though Elias does sound like an absolute villain, grooming Jon into horrible things, I was still not entirely convinced Elias is the super bad when I was first listening. He does want to stop the Unknowing after all.
Elias' ambiguous villainy and obvious asshole-ness was performed so well in this episode
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thoughts on dark!basira? I know she is canonically aligned to the hunt/the eye, but ultimately its pieces of the dark that she keeps coming back to.
Well I actually had a whole AU with someone where Basira became a dark avatar actually. It was going to center on her relationship with Jon. Or, well, it was mostly me blabbing the au and getting emoji reactions but... here is what I got:
Basira gets put on the strike force that goes after the Church of the Divine Host to rescue Callum Brodie long before she meets Jon. This means she is much less prepared for the encounter.
The good news is that stops the dark ooze from crawling into Callum Brodie. The bad news is once she does that, it latches onto her face.
Everything goes dark. It doesn't get all of the way in. Doesn't… stay all of the way out either.
Basira wakes up restrained in a dark room with some shadowy figures around her. She asks them to shine a little light in there, but--well. It's already fully lit, they say.
She has in fact been kidnapped by the remains of the Church of the Divine Host, who think--correctly--that there is now a piece of Rayner, their cult leader, in her brain trying to take over as the new host.
This at first starts with Basira locked up and kept under close watch. But slowly, Basira starts to hear a Rayner-like voice in her head and the cult members whisper around her and start to give her more freedom.
One--Manuela--spends more time with Basira.
Manuela is convinced that Basira already has all of the essence of the dark in her needed to be a member or even their leader, and all they need to do is cut her more slack and she will Become.
They cut Basira more slack. She escapes and runs right back to the police.
Basira rushes up to embrace Daisy who grabs her... sniffs? and then snarls and starts to strangle her.
"It's not her!" Daisy yells. "It's something else!"
The other police, of course, believe Daisy. Daisy is the expert on monsters.
Basira barely makes it away. In the end, she has to listen to Manuela's voice and slip into shadows where Daisy can't find her.
The cult lovingly welcomes her back.
Basira's captivity becomes more ambiguous. They don't lock her up. They don't tie her down. They don't even threaten to do anything if she tries to escape again. The real threat is Daisy--and all of the other cops, who are now on an active manhunt for Basira and will shoot her on sight. Basira actually needs the cult's help to stay safe from them.
Basira resigns herself. She settles down. She talks more to Manuela.
She starts to help them back. Uses her knowledge of tactics and the workings of the police force to improve their strategy.
They listen to her, because they think Rayner is working through her.
There... is still a voice in Basira's head. But she actively represses it. She thinks she's still herself. She just... decides not to think about it, or look into the matter too closely.
In fact, there are a lot of things Basira decides not to look into more closely.
One of Basira's decisions/suggestions is to make amends and ally with the Magnus Institute. This turns out to be pretty easy to do: all Elias Bouchard wants them to do is to meet the Archivist and... help him "understand" their god.
So Basira meets Jon in this context. Elias expects this to end in Jon being marked because avatars are sadistic pricks who would take Elias's wording as an excuse to terrify the New Guy. But Basira is working in more of a diplomatic mindset so she tells everyone in the cult to Not Bully The Archivist, That Might Fuck Up Our Alliance.
Elias is Extremely chagrined by this, because it's not like he can SAY that he wanted them to fuck up his guy, that would reveal his whole plan!
Jon goes in having read several statements on the cult, including ones from the police, and is brought to Basira.
"Maxwell Rayner?" he asks.
"Not really," Basira says.
And they collaborate without more words on the subject.
Jon assumes that Basira is still the cult leader. They meet up a few times after this, and he gets the church's help. But after a few meetings, he gets curious and ends up compelling her story out of her.
This ends up causing Basira to articulate quite a few things that she had been trying so hard not to think about, like the fact that she feels trapped and wouldn't be here if she felt like she had any other choice.
This freaks out everyone in the cult and they furiously shove Jon out and refuse to ever let him speak to their leader again.
Jon... has to accept this. But later, when Tim is dead and Martin is gone and Melanie won't even look at him and Jon is eaten up by guilt... he'll start to want to save someone to justify his own existence to himself. And then, in lieu of someone in a coffin to rescue, his mind will turn back to the alleged cult leader who said she didn't even want to be there, and who got cut off from their meetings the second she expressed this.
Jon starts to make a plan.
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AU of the Archives finding out Jon is being held by the Circus (while he’s still being held captive there?)
anon, thank you for giving me an excuse to write something like this; i am always looking for 101 h/c lol. warning for discussions/depictions of the kidnapping scenario in 101.
1. They only really find out by accident. More specifically, they find out because Melanie is snooping around the Institute (already searching for solutions to her being trapped there), and finds the tape, somehow, the one where Nikola talks to Elias. She only needs to listen through once before they put the pieces together: Georgie told her Jon left. They haven't seen Jon since—and sure, he wasn't in much before, but—this long? And that is Jon's voice on the tape: muffled and panicked and indecipherable, but still pretty obviously him.
Melanie shows it to the others, and the tape isn't even finished before Martin is demanding they have to find him, they have to find him now, panic flashing visibly in his eyes—he's been gone for WEEKS, and why didn't I notice, why didn't any of YOU notice, and don't fucking try to argue with me, Tim, Jon has been KIDNAPPED and they're going to KILL HIM— And Tim looks hurt, at this insinuation, is snapping back before Martin can even finish, I wasn't going to ARGUE, Martin, Christ, and he hasn't told them about his brother yet, but he immediately went pale when he heard Nikola's voice, heard her going on about skinning Jon, and they all saw it, and Melanie and Basira are putting it together before Martin is: Tim's in, too.
Basira's the one who says We need to find him in the end, but Martin and Tim have already decided by then.
2. In the end, Elias is the one who tells them where Jon is. (After some persuasion.) He hadn't intended to originally, but obviously they already know, and obviously no one is going to be focused on finding the ritual site, and sloppy work won't benefit anyone, much less the whole world. (And if the rescue goes messy, and it ends up benefitting the whole of his plan, well—)
They take a car and ride up there, the four of them. (There's some brief argument as to whether or not they all should go, but Martin's obviously going, and Tim doesn't back down, and Basira insists she can get them in and out, and Melanie isn't saying no…) It's a long, tense car ride, hours of mostly silence broken up by panic on Martin's behalf. (He's still berating himself, even if he won't berate the others—how could they not have known, how could he not have noticed, how has Jon been held prisoner somewhere for weeks and Elias didn't goddamn tell them, and it's been so long, and what if it's too late, what if they're too late, what if he's already dead—) And then, eventually, Tim breaks the silence. By telling them what happened to his brother. (It's NOT a statement, he says, but it feels like one anyway, and no one speaks until he's done. He sounds choked up by the end, furious and fearful and grieving all at once—I didn't think they would come for—I-I didn't think Jon would…)
The images from Tim's story loom over well enough, along with the half-remembered sounds of the tape sent to Elias. We're going to use every piece of you. I thought you'd make a lovely frock. The imagery is grotesque and Martin is sick with it, leaning against the car window, hoping with a fierce desperation that they aren't too late.
3. They aren't too late. And they get in without being detected, somehow. (Afterwards, Basira will keep saying that it was too easy, the whole thing felt too easy, and Tim will say tiredly, "Who the fuck cares? We got out.")
Jon's woken up by someone whispering his name—quiet, with a gentle subtlety that the Stranger more than lacks. It's Martin—this becomes clear as soon as he opens his eyes, although it takes a moment for everything to slot into place, the reality of Martin leaning over him, eyes wide with concern. "Oh, Christ, you're all right," Martin says, his voice shaking. "Thank God. I-I thought…" He stops then, and goes to work on getting Jon free.
"Martin?" Jon hisses as soon as the gag is gone, and then—Tim, working at the ropes on his legs, Melanie and Basira towards the door. "What—wh-what are you doing here?"
"What are you talking about?" Melanie says, her voice as muted as the others. "We found you, that's what we're doing here."
"Y-you can't be here," says Jon, still stuck in the panic of the past few weeks. "They'll kill you, you can't be here…"
"We're already here," says Tim. "We're not leaving you behind."
Jon's eyes jerk between the four of them frantically before landing back on Martin—Martin, who looks like he's nearly on the verge of tears, who says, "We're getting you out of here, Jon," and helps him to his feet. Jon grips at his hand as he's pulled to his feet, the relief washing through him in waves—he hadn't realized until then how much he'd expected never to be rescued or found—how much he'd thought he would die here.
4. They get hotel rooms rather than driving back—it's a long drive, and Jon looks nearly dead on his feet, and it makes sense. Jon sleeps for nearly sixteen hours straight after a long-running shower, and the others mostly alternate between sleeping and watching for agents of the Circus. (No one ever comes.)
Melanie calls Georgie to let her know. Tim leaves Elias a nasty voicemail. Martin goes to get breakfast from a store nearby, and take-out tea, and when Jon wakes up, they eat clustered in the hotel room to mostly silence.
Jon says, at one point, I didn't think anyone would come. He says it mostly to the floor, when the others are out of the room, and it's just him and Martin drinking tea that isn't nearly as good as the homemade stuff. He clears his throat and adds, Thank you for… for coming, Martin, I…
Martin tenses beside him immediately in immediate horror, says, Of course we came; of course we came, Jon, I don't know why—I-I am so sorry, I'm SO sorry we didn't come sooner, we didn't know… We didn't know, I'm so sorry.
It doesn't matter, says Jon. It doesn't matter, just… thank you. Thank you for coming, I… i-if anything had happened to you, I wouldn't have…
They're leaning together, almost unconsciously, their arms pressed together, and Martin says, I'll always come. If… I-I hope this never happens again, Jon, b-but I… I'll always come.
Sitting in the dim-lit hotel room, Jon believes him. He knows immediately that he's telling the truth, and he says, I will, too, and he means it just as much.
5. The whole experience is a catalyst to everyone talking more, because how could it not be? There's a difference between someone saying they were kidnapped and actually hearing about it—actually seeing it. The drive back leaves plenty of time to make peace, or something like it.
Jon starts spending more time in the Archives, in the weeks before he has to leave again. He and Martin have lunch almost every day; sometimes the others join them. Melanie calls and tells Georgie what's happened, and Georgie immediately reaches out to make sure Jon is okay. And Jon and Tim make their peace, more or less, gradually—not all at once, but gradually. (Tim hugs Jon when they get back and says he's glad he's okay. Jon offers an apology a few days later, for everything they haven't had the chance to talk about, and the recorders come on, and neither of them mention it. And nearly a week later, Tim tells Jon about what happened to his brother.) And it's something, some step in the right direction, towards healing.
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Myopic
A few weeks ago I made this post joking about s4 Jon losing his glasses out of spite, and today I decided to put it in fic form. Hope you enjoy!
1k words, s4 spoilers (Read on Ao3)
—
Thing is, she almost doesn’t notice when he stops wearing his glasses.
Okay, honestly, Basira has always thought of Jon as...a little odd.
The Magnus Institute credentials didn’t help — if years of being sectioned had taught her anything, it’d been that nothing normal ever comes out of that place — but it wasn’t just that. It was something more...supernatural. Not that Jon was really anything supernatural per se (at least, not when she’d first met him), but he certainly fit the job he had. Chalk it up to his whole “tortured academic” bit. He’s a nice enough guy, but he’s still odd. He’s just odd.
Of course, that all gets ramped up to an eleven after the Unknowing fiasco. She’s not sure if it’s just Beholding-typical bullshit or the fact that the explosion blew off a rational thinking part of his brain, but when he’s back on his feet, at work, just two days after coming out of a coma, well......that’s not normal, right? It can’t be normal. Maybe Basira’s never actually seen someone come out of a coma after that long, but with basic medical knowledge, the doctors’ frantic diagnoses, the paperwork (god, all that paperwork—), it just seems like nothing short of a miracle.
Or a maybe curse. But she’s trying to stay positive.
She asks Melanie once what she thinks of Jon’s situation. Melanie’s skinning an apple as she tells her that they were just wasting electricity on keeping his life support going, and Basira doesn’t ask Melanie about Jon anymore after that.
So she doesn’t bring it up.
Hell, it almost feels too mundane to bring up. Lining that up next to Jon’s other “side effects,” it feels inconsequential — a minor aesthetic preference compared to ripping information out of people or Knowing the entire history of the coffee maker in the breakroom (and yes, he had told her that, and no, she hadn’t asked.)
It isn’t even his weirdest trait; that one was reserved for the whole “sleeping with his eyes open” thing he now did. Daisy’s the one to bring this revelation up in the middle of a Thursday physical therapy session.
“Oh, yeah. It’s weird as hell,” Basira says, pushing Daisy’s leg up over her head. “I went in his office the other day? Had a full-on conversation before realizing he was completely conked out, just......staring at me.”
Daisy chuckles a little at this. “He’s a right freak, isn’t he?”
“He’s something alright.”
“And a stubborn bastard too. Still can’t get him to wear his glasses. He says I can’t make him,” Daisy grunts, then smiles, all teeth. “Almost makes me want to go back, just so I can prove him wrong.”
“You noticed that too?” Basira asks, lowering Daisy’s leg and picking up the other. “What’s up with that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like is it some freaky Eye business? You sign your soul away and suddenly you get good vision?”
Daisy does laugh at this. “Oh god no. He can’t see shit.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. Blind as a bat. Catch him squintin’ at statements when he thinks I’m not looking.” She grabs her leg and pulls it closer. “Probably just some stupid test of his. I don’t ask, otherwise he won’t shut up.”
“At least that didn’t change.”
“Heh. Yeah. Better than him moping all day about not being human.”
Basira hums, low in her throat, and begins lowering Daisy’s leg. “Do you think he is? Not human, I mean?”
“Who, Sims?” Daisy snorts. “Nah.”
Basira frowns as she holds out her hand. “How can you be so sure?”
Daisy takes Basira’s waiting hand, pulls herself to her feet. Dusts herself off, because the dirt still hasn’t left her clothes, even all these weeks later. “Easy,” Daisy says, and her grin is like knives. “Monsters are smarter.”
—
“Jon,” Basira greets, giving a knock on his open office door.
“B-Basira!” Jon jolts, scrambling to make his office, his desk, himself more presentable in the split second before she can take it all in. Like she hadn’t just watched him for the past five minutes with his nose mere centimeters from a statement, all cagey, all Archivist-y. “I-is there something I can do for you?”
“I just—” she stops herself. Takes a breath, and then asks, “Do you want my readers?”
“I’m......sorry?”
“It’s just...I saw you squinting? At the statement. You know that’s bad for your eyes.”
Jon cracks a half-smile at this, which does nothing to alleviate her concerns. She takes a step further into his office before pressing, “You’re not doing something stupid, are you?”
“Oh, n-no no. I’m just.......the Eye, it looks through...well, eyes,” he explains, which, yeah, Basira had already had a feeling that was the case with all the creepy portraits around the building. “I-I figured turning down the focus might deter it from, well, looking so much.”
Basira blinks. “You’re serious.”
“Erm...yes?”
“So why not just...use another one us?”
Jon blinks.
“The Eye,” she clarifies. “For seeing.”
Jon blinks again. Stares her over. He’s looking at her like she’s grown an extra set of eyes on her forehead, which is ironic considering, if anyone, he’d be the one doing so. When another beat of oppressive silence passes, she waves it off with her hand.
“Forget it,” Basira says, then digs her reading glasses from her pocket. “I’ll leave these on my desk if you need them, alright?”
“R-right......thank you, Basira.”
“Sure. I’ll leave you to it, then.”
Basira nods and shuts the door with a sensible click.
—
Later, as she’s packing up her work for the day, Basira passes the breakroom and catches Jon, face knitted in pensive consideration. He’s standing by the kettle, now bubbling, with a row of tea boxes. He’s squinting at the one in his hand, so tight she thinks his face might stick if he’s not careful, before he nods. Pulls out a bag. Plops it into his mug.
Basira watches as he lifts the kettle, relaxes, then pours the entire contents on the counter to the left of the mug.
A part of her thinks she should help when he lets out a shout.
The other, stronger part wins out though, and she quietly continues down the hall.
Right. Well.
She’ll leave him to it, then.
#thank you for entertaining my silly little fic ideas#tma#magnuspod#tma fic#the magnus archives#milk writes
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MAG S4
oogfh here comes the concerns
I have lots of thoughts about S4 but all in all I DID enjoy it. I really did. But I also think this was the season that really exposed the prevalent writing flaws that tma had in general.
I think first of all with S4 is that it was much harder to get through all of a sudden compared to S3’s brisk pace - there wasn’t enough levity. Not enough humour, and I can't stress how important the humour is in this damn story. I needed a giggle every ep even when it was dramatic and serious. And it made it emotionally difficult. (I know that's the point.)
I think I understand what particularly bothers me about S4 and honestly a prevalent problem in tma in general and it has to do with the fact it gets a little stale when people are so venomously angry for no reason. There is a lot of misdirected anger that was directed towards Jon - and I’m not just saying that as the audience just gets to see Jon as the most sympathetic. I like the conflict more when it's people struggling to understand and failing. Jon's a pretty good example because he's figuring out the best way to care but also succumbing to his own issues and faults. and I think the other characters don't get that same sort of treatment (Tim, Basira, Melanie, etc). And I get the audience wants to root for Jon, I really do. but the complaints make a lot of sense to me because it doesn't feel like anyone's trying to figure out the root issue and just stay angry all the time. people can be withdrawn for more complicated reasons. even with the Lonely/Ghost bullet very obviously affecting everyone it just feels. less human I guess. you can be resentful but there should be a push and pull tug, not "Everyone Hate Jon" party (especially when Elias was much more brutal in S3). There's more nuance to that and the podcast often fails to give them enough space to try. I think the closest they get to it is Melanie’s conflicting feelings, all of her trust being destroyed for her life to be saved. That was fun. I liked that.
Other than that though, the plot beats are really good. REALLY GOOD. I think about the ocean door metaphor a lot because OF COURSE I DO it’s absolutely devastating that this analogy is explained to basira, who then never actually applies his explanation to anything useful.
And now it’s time to accept that Jon's use of powers no matter how important it is to "the story" is traumatizing innocent people... it's hard to accept but as an audience you seriously have to fucking understand why no one trusts him at the institute even though he's nice. Also EXCELLENT use of a statement that wasn't compelled but also very comprehensive. That voice acting was incredible. it's MARTIN taking that statement it's already hard for us (rooting for Jon) I can't even imagine being in his position wanting to protect Jon over and over and over with his own life and hearing THIS. He has to actively hope Jon made this horrible decision because otherwise the only other option is that Jon is completely gone, and it's so upsetting,
Also I absolutely need Melanie/Georgie fics of them falling in love at the Institute. the implied emotions and feelings of that whole thing with JON, GEORGIE’S SUPERNATURAL EX BEING THE CENTER OF IT ALL. before they were decidedly going to live together like WHAT
And then the ending to S4. God what a culmination of everything we learned about, finally the payoff we’ve all been looking forward to. I know Jonny and Alex said it was really hard to nail the Jon and Martin dynamic because they have SO FEW INTERACTIONS in S4, and I like to imagine it really helped with their care in terms of writing them. Martin really shows the work he’s been planning in order to save Jon. Jon’s final mark is him willingly going to save Martin, no matter what. Elias’s wager being entirely based on his realization of the lengths they’d go for each other. “I see you” what a powerful way to reclaim a running motif, a twisted phrase in this story. The “hello Jon” statement. Seriously this was so fucking awesome and a great payoff for a bit of a bit of an unsteady, but jampacked season. I honestly saw S4 in its entirety and thought “yeah. You know what? S5, no matter what happens, I can trust the creators to at least create something satisfying and awesome at the end, they can stick the landing.” And that continued to be my confident assumption starting S5 (Spoilers. I regret believing that.)
==
[Masterlist] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
(talk to me!! send asks if you have any!)
#tma#the magnus archives#linktoo rambles#I'll take awhile before I finish up my S5 notes IM JUST A LITTLE BIT MISERABLE OK
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Inspired by this post
I adore corruption arcs, so I graded how well the non-archivist characters would have damned humanity if they had been the archivist.
Sasha James 11/10, would be an ideal archivist, this plus her height is probably why the stranger monster targeted her before she could peak
I have a soft spot for any au that knows Sasha has never seen a brain cell in her life and that any unhinged!Sasha au is really just a regular Sasha au. Picture it with me. Sasha and Jon have parallel archivist tracks, until Sasha (my beloved show off) decides: you know what would make me more efficient at snooping? Becoming a Human Google. And things accelerate. The Web doesn't even need to bother with subtly magic lighters, it slaps all 14 marks on her at once by pulling up next to Sasha in a windowless van with "free secrets 👍" written on the side.
After the Unknowing, Sasha takes over the institute from Elias instead of Martin and Peter. With Tim dead, Jon in a coma, Martin lonely-snatched, Melanie compulsively homicidal, Daisy in the coffin, and Basira on autopilot, she quickly bonds with Rosie, the ultimate nosiness enabler. Sasha is a fully marked archivist for a good long while, but doesn't start the apocalypse right away because she's eager to read ALL the ominous notes Elias left, so the watcher's crown statement is in her to-be-read pile. When the apocalypse starts (Rosie: "Hey, Sasha, I just read something extra fucked up that Elias wrote, wanna see?" Sasha: "God yes."), she books it to become the pupil with Rosie as her anchor. Mayhapse an anchor-archivist polycule with Archivist Jon and Martin? Mayhapse Jon is just a normal eye avatar here and deeply invested in all of Sasha's eyepocalypse statements, so it's Sasha and her plus-three? Mayhapse it's a race across the eyepocalypse wasteland between Archivist Sasha and Archivist Jon to usurp Jonah and become the pupil?
Tim Stoker 2/10 dude's here for a good time, not a long time
The only way I see this working is if Elias disguises not-stranger clues as circus related so Tim is motivated to investigate. Otherwise, his archival assistants are way more curious than him and disobey his direct orders to 🍹chill🏝. Jon, Sasha, and Martin inadvertently bring marks home to him like cats bring home dead birds. He asserts his agency when he decides the best course of action? Actually? Just blow up the archives. This unfortunately puts him in a false sense of security, and Elias makes him read the watcher's crown statement by cat fishing him on grindr and sending the ritual as a dm mid conversation.
Daisy Tonner - 9/10 archivist, would have started doomsday before she was at the archivist job long enough to use her PTO
Daisy already had a lot of experience hunting down fear-entity-related people in sectioned cases, which means she possibly canonically already has all the marks from just hunting avatars who use their powers in self defense. The reason she lost one point is because she's too much of a jock to read, only nerds are culpable to watcher crown statements, so this would be the only delay but oh what a delay it will be.
Melanie King - 7/10 archivist, points awarded for achieving her breakthroughs by smashing her head against a wall until she literally breaks through, points deducted for doing so in full clown makeup.
If Jon got a handful of marks by just asking anoying questions in the same room as an avatar, imagine how much faster Melanie would get marks by bringing her trademark Chaotic Brat personality on fear entity investigations. The apocalypse would have started in like two seasons: one season to hire her off the streets and establish shakey, complex relationships with her new assistants (Jon and Sasha put in the time with the institute but were passed over on this promotion for some random YouTuber (plus they're tighter with Tim and Martin, so proletarian solidarity against the boss)).
Then a second season to stab every mark and get stabbed in return. Melanie would blitz through all 14 marks because what precious little impulse control she starts with is slowly replaced with slaughter juice. One fun moral ambiguity to explore could be if Melanie tries to use her new, dangerous Eye/Slaughter powers to revive her reputation and platform in the supernatural community now that she can, ya know, identify supernatural things for the first time ever. Does she acknowledge her entire career up to her hospital episode apparently only investigated fake sightings? A better question to ask is whether Basira, Tim, and Jon ever let her live down how Ghost Hunt UK's professional dignity was contingent on the legitimacy of her sCiEnTiFiC gHoSt eQuIpMeNt in those episodes, so the temperature spikes set to dramatic music were well and truly just temperature spikes and dramatic music. Sasha found a clip of that music playing as Melanie narrates "it's a message... from the other side..." and made it as her text tone.
Also, it would be hilarious if Melanie tried to kill Jonah on sight in the panopticon, once again botched assassination attempt number 1,963,538, and then Jon quietly snuck in to finish the job on his first try just like in canon.
Jon: "What, like it's hard?"
Basira Hussain 3/10 archivist, her eye alignment manifests as office gossip, like a normal person
Basira has the most formidable super power of all: the power to nope tf out of any conversation or plan she wants. She therefore would probably take 10x longer to start the apocalypse than any other archivist because her fatal flaw is refusal to directly engage with a lot of personally difficult things (like the slaughter bullet surgery she organized, Daisy In General, etc). The marks will be slow going if she resists putting her safety on the line or invests time in making good plans (which is smart, but unhelpful for dooming humanity). She would for sure still get marked and end the world because once she's convinced of a plan (aka Elias convinces her of a plan), she's ruthlessly efficient. So I'd stay out of her way that last year or two, she marks the entities right back at them.
Martin Blackwood 2/10 archivist, considering a prerequisite for creepy eye avatar staring is the ability to make eye contact.
S1 Archivist Martin would probably dote too much on the employees under him to be hugely susceptible to Elias' isolation-dependant manipulation. Any progress Martin inadvertently achieves toward the watcher's crown goal would have to be contingent on it helping his loved ones, which is perfect fuel for a "corrupted by good intentions" arc. This would be key because Martin has superb bullshit and manipulation detection, making the marks are tricky but not impossible to orchistrate considering Jon can't stay put in a safe corner for 10 minutes and Martin's mother would refuse to stay with him where she's safe from avatar threats.
Imagine the petty drama when Jon and Sasha learn he got the promotion they wanted because he lied on his CV.
Other than that, Martin would be even worse about pit stops on the apocalypse road trip than Jon because his Kill Bill mode would have no off switch. Does Archivist!Martin and his anchor Jon ever reach the panopticon? Eventually, but not until after they lose points for significantly reducing the apocalypse fear quantity. Would Annabelle survive to deliver her cryptic MaCHiNAtIoNs and achieve the Web's goal? Hard No, additional point reduction for neutralizing the multiverse invasion. Points potentially earned back if Martin's Web connection is strong enough to come up with the multiverse invasion plan on his own, though.
Georgie Barker 4/10, as a fearless coward, all the fear she feeds to the entities would be khaki flavored. They'd get their apocalypse, but they probably wouldn't enjoy the meal.
Similar to Basira, Georgie has the super power to Fuck This Shit I'm Out. She would overall be a subpar humanity damning archivist; a major archivist success factor of Jon's is that he has enough affective empathy to be afraid with every statement giver he reads, so when Jon archives a statement, he unintentionally contributes to the fear soup seasoning. Combined with how Georgie doesn't want anything to do with entity drama, so any corruption specific to the watcher's crown would stagnate. Even her casual exposition conversations would go like
Georgie: "I've connected no dots."
Melanie: "you've connected a lot of dots??"
Georgie: "I've connected shit all dots."
The reason she gets one more point than Basira is because Georgie's fatal flaw is the passive observer quality the Eye tried to stoke in Jon. Her level of engagement oscillates between two extremes, impulsive over commitment and judging from a distance. This would probably lead her to geting involved just long enough for her involvement to become irreversible, at which point she would try to cut that shit out of her life after it's trapped her. She'd linger, barricading herself on the margins of this problem as the marks that are targeted at her slowly tally up until boom. Apocalypse is on and she only half understands what's happening.
Georgie would wander around an apocalypse hellscape confused, but vibes and physical health fully intact. Anchor!Melanie would have quite the emotional journey starting with Georgie on that pedestal Melanie placed her, and ending with a slaughter avatar stabbing the person who convinced her to work on her slaughter inclination.
#the magnus archives#tma#jonathan sims#jon sims#martin blackwood#basira hussain#daisy tonner#melanie king#Georgie Barker#Tim Stoker#sasha james
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In Search of Lost Screws (RQBB '21)
Here at last is my entry for the 2021 Rusty Quill Big Bang!
Fandom: The Magnus Archives Rating: T Word count: ~30k Warnings: Chronic Illness, Mild Body Horror, Internalized Ableism, Canon-Typical Spiders, Mention of Canon-Typical Suicidal Ideation, Alcohol Other tags: Cane-user Jon, EDS Jon, Canon-compliant, Season 5, Set in 180-181 (Upton Safehouse period) Characters: Jon Sims, Martin Blackwood, Mikaele Salesa (secondary), Annabelle Cane (secondary) Relationships: Jon/Martin Summary: While staying at Upton House, Jon and Martin accidentally break their bedroom’s doorknob, and can’t get back into the room until they fix it. Meanwhile Jon tries not to break into literal pieces without the Eye, and also to pretend he’s having a good time as he and Martin lunch with Annabelle, parry gifts from Salesa, and quarrel about whether Jon’s okay or not. He's fine! It's just that the apocalypse runs on dream logic, and chronic pain feels worse when you're awake. Excerpt:
“Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?” “I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here.” “Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.” “Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?” Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice. “Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him. “Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.” “Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.” Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?
Huge thanks to @pilesofnonsense for hosting this event; to @connanro for beta-reading; and to @silmapeli for their amazing illustration, whose own post you can find here.
If you prefer, you can read this fic instead on Ao3. I won't link it directly, since Tumblr has trouble with external links, but if you google the title and add "echinoderms" (my Ao3 handle), it should come up!
Crunch. “Oh god. Shit! Oh god, oh no—”
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
A clatter, then a noise like a small rock scraping a large one. Jon’s heart plunged; halfway through his question he knew the answer.
“I—I broke it? Look, see, the whole thing just—take this.” Martin tore his hand out of Jon’s and dropped the severed doorknob in it instead. Then he dropped to the floor, diving head- and hands-first for the crack between it and the door as if that crack were a portal between dimensions. Jon closed his eyes and shook this image away, hoping when he opened them again he could focus on what was real.
He should have known this would happen from the moment they left for breakfast. Every time he’d opened that door its knob felt a little looser. Why hadn’t he warned Martin? Well, alright, he didn’t need powers to know that one. He just hadn’t thought of it. Been a bit preoccupied, after all. And even if he had thought of it, that was exactly the kind of conversation he’d been shying away from all week. Watch out for that doorknob; it’s a little loose, he would say, and yeah, probably Martin would answer, Oh, thanks. But there was a chance Martin would say instead, Why didn’t you tell me?—and all week Jon had obeyed an instinct to avoid prompting that question. All week he had made sure to enter and exit their room a few steps ahead of Martin, and hold the door open for him. Martin probably just saw it as Jon’s way of apologizing for their first few months in the Archives together, and once that thought occurred to him Jon had started to look at it that way himself. Maybe that’s why he’d forgot this time.
“Nooo-oooo, come on come on!”
“I don’t think you’ll fit,” Jon said, when he looked again and found Martin trying to wedge his fingers under the door.
(Martin used to leave Jon’s office door open behind him—perhaps absentmindedly, but more likely as a gesture of friendship and openness, which the Jon of that time would not suffer. Sasha and Tim, n.b., only left his door open on their way into his office, when they didn’t intend to stay long; Martin would leave it gaping even if he didn’t mean to come back. Every time Jon had sighed, pulled himself to his feet, and closed the door behind Martin, drawing out the click of its tongue in the latch. And a few times he’d closed the door in front of him, so as to exclude him from a conversation between Jon and Tim or Sasha that he, Martin, had tried to weigh in on from outside Jon’s office.)
“What are you looking for?”
“The—the screw, I saw it roll under there. It fell down on our side. Oh, my god, it was so close—if I’d reacted just half a second earlier, I could’ve?—shit.”
“Oh.” Jon huffed out a cynical laugh.
“I can’t believe it. I broke Salesa’s door! He welcomes us in to an oasis, and I break the door. Oh, god—I’ve broken an irreplaceable door, in a stately historic mansion!”
A few more demonstrative huffs of laughter. “No you didn’t.”
Martin paused. He didn’t get up, but did turn his head to look at Jon. “Yes I did. It’s right there in your hand, Jon—”
“I should’ve known. Check for cobwebs, Martin.”
“Oh come on.”
“This can’t be your fault—it’s far too neat. This is all part of Annabelle’s plan.”
“Do you know that?”
“W-well, no. I can’t, not here. I just—”
“Yeah, I don’t think so, Jon. Pretty sure it’s just an old doorknob.”
“Did you check for cobwebs?”
“Of course there are no cobwebs. A spider wouldn’t even have time to finish building the web before somebody wrecked it opening the door!”
“Then what’s that?” With the tip of his cane Jon tapped the floor in front of a clot of gray fluff in the seam between two walls next to the door, making sure not to let it touch the clot itself.
Martin rolled over to see where he was pointing, and almost stuck his elbow in it. “Ah. Gross. Gross, is what that is.”
“Christ, I should’ve known this would happen. I did know this would happen,” Jon reminded himself—“just ignored the warning signs because I can’t think straight here.”
“It doesn’t mean anything, Jon. It’s a corner. Spiders love corners. I mean, unless you can prove the corner of our doorway has more spiderwebs than anywhere else in the house—”
“Well, of course not. You forget she’s got her own corner somewhere, which we still haven’t found by the way—”
“So, what, you think Annabelle Cane lassoed the screw with a strand of cobweb.”
“Not literally? She could be sitting on the other side of the door with a magnet for all we know!”
Martin peered under the door again with an exasperated sigh. “She’s not.”
“Not now she’s heard us talking about her.”
God, what a delicate web that would be, if all he had to do to avoid the spider’s clutches was reach a door before Martin did. Perhaps if he’d knocked first that’d have saved him. Maybe Martin was right. How could Annabelle know him well enough to foresee this mistake? Most of the time he hated people opening doors for him, after all.
Why do people see someone with a cane and think, Only one free hand? How ever will he open the door!? They don’t do that for people with shopping bags—not ones his age, at least. Letting another person open a door for him felt to Jon like… defeat, somehow. Like admitting the dolce et decorum estness of this version of reality all nondisabled people seemed to live in where he couldn’t open doors. And that version of reality horrified him. Not so much the idea of being too weak to open them—that sounded merely annoying. Like knocking the sides of jar lids on tables and swearing, only with doors. He had beat his fists against enough Pull doors in his time to figure he could live with that. It was more the idea of becoming that way. Letting his door-opening muscles atrophy ‘til it became the truth.
But sometimes you just let a thing happen, and forget to hate it. That was the thing about pride. Sometimes your convictions and your habits stop fitting together—you believe Fuck this job with all your heart, but still tuck in your shirt when you come to the office. And then you fly back from America in borrowed clothes, and pop in at the Institute like that on your way to Gertrude’s storage unit, and that’s what changes your habits. Not the knowledge you can’t be fired; not your now-boyfriend’s plot to put your then-boss behind bars. A thirdhand t-shirt with a slogan on it about how to outrun bears.
On his way out this morning the doorknob had felt so loose in Jon’s hand he almost had told Martin about it. But Martin had been full of let’s-go-on-an-adventure-together-style chatter—like when they’d left Daisy’s safehouse, only, get this, without the dread of entering an apocalyptic wasteland—and listening to him put the door out of Jon’s mind before he’d had time to interject.
Their first day here—or at least, the first they spent awake—Jon had inadvertently taught Martin not to accept invitations from Salesa. The latter had bounded up after Martin’s lunch in linen shirt and whooshy shorts and was, to Martin’s then-unseasoned heart, impossible to deny. So Jon had spent thirty minutes on a creaky folding chair, lunging out of his seat on occasion to collect a ball one of the other two had hit wrong, and trying to keep Salesa’s too-bright white socks out of sight. He’d pretended he preferred to sit out, knowing Martin would worry if he tried to play. But he hadn’t done as good a job hiding his boredom as he thought. “Thanks for putting up with that. Sorry it went on so long,” Martin had said as they re-entered their bedroom. “I just couldn’t say no to him, you know? For such a cynical old man he’s got impressive puppy eyes.”
“It’s fine? You know me, I don’t mind… watching.”
“I just mean, I’m sorry you couldn’t play. How’s your leg, by the way? Er—both your legs, I guess.”
“It’s fine. They’re both fine. I didn’t want to play anyway, remember? I don’t know how.”
“Sure you don’t,” Martin replied, words tripping over a fond laugh.
“I don’t!”
“Come on, Jon. Everyone knows how to play ping-pong.”
Martin had turned down Salesa when he showed up the next day in khaki shorts and a pith helmet with three butterfly nets, without Jon’s having to say a word. More emphatically still did he turn him down when Salesa mentioned the house had an indoor pool, and offered to lend them both antique bathing suits like the one he had on, “Free of charge! A debtor is an enemy, after all, and in this new world I have no wish to make an enemy of” (sarcastic whisper, fingers wiggling) “the Ceaseless Watcher who rules it. I have nothing to hide from you,” he’d alleged, for the… third time that day, maybe? Each morning Jon resolved to count such references; he rarely missed one, as far as he knew, but kept forgetting how many he’d counted.
But Salesa was a salesman, and over time his efforts had grown more subtle. He stopped showing up already dressed for the activity he had in mind, and instead would drop hints at meals about all the fun things they could do if only they would let him show them. Martin loved how the winter sunlight caught, every afternoon around four, in the branches of a tree visible outside the window of their bedroom. “Ah, yes,” Salesa had agreed when he remarked on it one morning. “Turning it periwinkle and the golden green of champagne.” (He poured sparkling wine—the cheap stuff, he said, not real champagne—into an empty juice glass still lined with orange pulp. Over and over, without once overflowing. The oranges weren’t ripe enough to drink their juice plain yet, he said. But they’d still run out of juice first.) “If you think that’s beautiful”—he paused to swallow bubbles come up from his throat, waved his hand, shook his head. “No. On one tree, yes, it is beautiful. But on a whole orchard of bare trees in winter”—he nodded in the direction of Upton’s orchards—“the afternoon sun is sublime. You can see how the twigs shrink and shiver under its gaze; the grass rustles with a hitch in its breath as if it fears to be seen, but with each undulation a new blade flashes gold like a coin,” &c., &c.
“Wow. Sounds like you really got lucky, finding such a nice place to, uh. Sssset up camp?”
Jon knew Martin well enough to hear the judgment in his voice; if Salesa recognized it then he was an expert at pretending not to. “And it's only a two-minute walk away,” he’d said, instead of taking Martin’s bait. “It would be such a shame for my guests not to see it.”
“Oh, well. Maybe in a few days? It’s just, we’ve been outside nonstop for ages. It’s nice to be between four walls again. Besides, we don’t know the grounds as well as you do—and the border isn’t all that stable, you said? Right?”
“It is if you know how to follow it! I could accompany you—show you all the best sights, with no risk of wandering back out into the hellscape by mistake.”
“We’re just not really ready for that, I don’t think. Right, Jon?”
“Mm.”
“Are you sure? If it were me, a foray into a beautiful natural oasis would be just what I needed to convince myself that my peace—my sanctuary—is real.”
“If it is real,” Jon couldn’t stop himself from muttering.
Salesa remained impervious. “You would be surprised how difficult it is to feel fear in a place like that. I don’t think that is just the camera.”
“We‘ll think about it,” Martin conceded.
“Yes—you should both think about it. I am at your disposal whenever you change your mind.”
And so on that morning they had narrowly escaped. Would they had fared so well today. The problem was, on these early occasions Jon had interpreted Martin’s No thankses as being, well, Martin’s. But after a few more of Salesa’s sales pitches Jon began to second-guess that.
“Is it warm enough in here for you both?” Salesa had asked them last night at dinner. “I worry too much, perhaps. I only wish the place took less time to warm up in the morning. At breakfast time, in sunny weather like we've been having, I’ll bet you anything you like it’s warmer out there than in here.”
“It’s alright; we’re not too cold in the mornings either. Right, Jon?”
“Hm? Oh—no.”
“Perhaps we three could take breakfast out there, before the weather changes.”
“Ha—that’s right,” Martin had laughed. “I forgot you still had that out here. Weather changes. Brave new world, I guess.”
Salesa smirked and shrugged. “Well, braver than the rest of it.”
“R…ight. ‘We three,’ you said—so not Annabelle?”
“Mmmmno, probably not her. I have tried taking spiders outside before; they never seem to like it much.”
Nearly every day, here, Jon found a spider in their bathtub. The first time Martin had been with him. Martin had picked the thing up with his fingers and tried to coax it to leave out the window, but by the time he got there it’d crawled up his sleeve.
“Excuse me.”
Martin pulled back his own chair too and frowned up at him. “You okay?”
“Just needed the toilet.” He tried to arrange his mouth into a gentle smile. “Think I can do that on my own.”
The other two resumed their conversation the moment Jon left the dining room. Before the intervening walls muffled their voices Jon heard:
“I suppose that does sound pretty nice.”
“Pretty nice, you suppose? Martin, Martin—it’s a beautiful oasis! What a shame it will be if you leave this place having done no more than suppose about it.”
“It is a bit of a waste, I guess.”
“You wouldn’t need to sit on the ground, if that’s what concerns you. There are benches everywhere.”
He’d been just about to cross through a doorway and out of earshot when he froze, hearing his name:
“Oh, ha—not me, but, Jon might find that nice to know,” Martin said. “Thanks for.” And then silence.
Was that the whole reason he kept declining invitations to explore the grounds? To keep grass stains out of Jon’s trousers? Martin was the one who’d sat down on that godforsaken Extinction couch; why did he think—?
Not the point, Jon told himself as he sat on the toilet and set his forehead on the heels of his palms. He tried to watch the floor for spiders, but his eyes kept crossing. The point was that if—? If Martin was lying about wanting to stay inside—or, more charitably, if he was telling the truth but wanted that only because he thought Jon would have as dismal a time out in the garden as he had at ping-pong—then…?
He imagined holding hands with Martin while surrounded by green. Gravel crunching under their feet. Martin smiling, with sunlight caught in the strands of his hair that a slight breeze had blown upright.
“And if you get too warm,” he heard Salesa tell Martin, as he headed back into the dining room, “we can move into the shade of the pines! You know, they don’t just grow year-round? They also shed year-round. The floor under them is always carpeted in needles, so you need never get mud on your shoes.”
“Huh,” Martin laughed. “Never thought of it that way.”
“But of course there are benches there too,” Salesa added, his eyes flickering up to Jon.
As Jon hauled himself into his seat he asked, in a voice he hoped the strain made sound distracted ergo casual, “So, what, like a picnic, you mean.”
Not a fun picnic. Not very romantic, since their third wheel was the first to invite himself. Salesa neglected to mention how much wet grass they would have to trek through to get to his favorite spot; that there were benches everywhere didn’t matter since they couldn’t all three fit on one, so they ended up sat in the dirt after all—and n.b. it required a second trek to find a patch of dirt dry enough to sit on at this time of morning. Jon was so sick with fatigue by the time they sat down he could barely eat a thing, though he did dispatch most of Martin’s thermos of tea. His hands shook and buzzed, and felt clumsy, like they’d fallen asleep; he ended up getting more jam in the dirt than on Salesa’s soggy, pre-buttered toast. He felt as though the rest of his flesh had melted three feet to the left of his eyes, bones and mind. Eventually he elected to blame his dizziness on the sun. When his forehead and upper lip started to prickle, threatening sweat, he stood up and announced, “It’s too hot here.”
Or tried to stand, anyway. One leg had oozed just far enough out of its joint that it buckled when he tried to stand; indigo and fuchsia blotches overtook his sight. He pitched forward, free arm pinwheeling—might have fallen into the boiled eggs if Martin hadn’t caught him. “Jon! Are you okay?”
God, why was Martin so surprised? This must have been the fifth or sixth time he had asked him that question since they left the house. One time Jon had bent down to brush dirt off his leg and Martin had thought he was scratching his bandages. So he asked him were they itchy, had they started to peel, did they need changing again, were they cutting off his circulation (no, not yet, not yet, and no). How could someone be so attentive to imaginary ills and yet miss the real ones? At another point, an enormous blue dragonfly had buzzed past, and instead of Did you see that? Martin had turned around to ask Are you okay. Now, on this fifth or sixth occasion, for a few seconds of pure, nonsensical rage he wondered how Martin dared stoop to such emotional blackmail. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Jon thought; aloud he snorted, as in malicious laughter. His throat felt thick, like he might cry.
“Fine, I’m just—sick of it here.” He pulled his arm free of Martin’s and overbalanced. Didn’t fall, just. Staggered a little.
“Should we move to the shade? We could try to find those famous pines, I guess.”
Jon sank back to the ground. “What about Salesa? Do we just leave him here?”
“Oh. Right,” said Martin. Salesa had eaten most of Jon’s share, and drunk both Jon’s and Martin’s shares of wine. Now he lay asleep in the dirt, head pillowed on one elbow, the other hand’s fingers curled round the stem of a glass still half full. “I guess, yeah? I mean he seems to know the place pretty well, so. It’s not like he’ll get lost out here.”
“We might, though.”
Martin sighed. “True. Should we just head back to our room, then? Maybe get you a snack.”
“Not hungry.”
“A statement, I meant.”
“Oh. Alright, sure,” Jon made himself say. “That sounds like—sure.”
So then they’d headed back, and only Martin had a free hand, and Jon was too tired by that point to distinguish his mind’s vague warning not to let Martin open the door from his usual pride on that subject—and that kind of pride never does seem as important when it’s your boyfriend offering. So he’d dismissed the warning and, well, look what happened.
When he got up from his knees and turned round Martin frowned at Jon. “Are you alright? You’re sat on the floor.”
Jon frowned, too—at the seam between the floor and the hallway’s opposite wall. “I was tired.”
“You hate sitting on the floor.”
“I sat on the ground out there,” Jon said, with a shrug that morphed into a nod in the direction they’d come from.
“Yeah, under duress,” Martin scoffed. “In the Extinction domain you wouldn’t even sit on the couch.”
There was something odd in Martin’s bringing that up now; somewhere, in the back of his mind, Jon could hear a pillar of thought crumbling. But he lacked the energy to find out which of his mind’s structures now stood crooked. “I think this floor is a lot cleaner than that couch,” he said instead, with an incredulous laugh.
“Even with the cobwebs?” Martin didn’t wait for Jon’s answering nod. “Fair enough,” he said, one hand on the back of his neck as he twisted it back and forth. He dropped the hand, sighed, cracked his knuckles. Looked at Jon again. “Yeah, okay. Guess we don’t have to deal with this right now. Let’s find you another bedroom first.”
“Maybe that’s just what Annabelle wants,” Jon muttered, deadpanning so he wouldn’t have to decide whether this was a joke.
Martin snorted. “I’ll risk it.”
Find was a generous way to put it; in fact there was another bedroom only two doors down. By the time Jon got his legs unfolded he could hear the squeak of a door swinging open down the hall. When he looked up, Martin said as their eyes met, “Nope—bed’s too small. You good there ‘til I find one that’ll work?”
“Seems that way.” Jon tried to smile, relief warring with his usual If you want something done right urge. In the quiet moment after Martin neglected to close that door and before he swung open the next one, Jon made himself add, “Thank you.”
“Of course. Oh wow,” Martin said of the next room, in whose doorway he’d stopped. “This one’s a lot nicer than ours. It’s got a balcony. Wallpaper’s pretty loud though. D’you think that’ll keep you awake?” Laughingly, “I know you don’t close your eyes to sleep anymore, so.”
“How loud is ‘pretty loud’?”
“Sort of a… dark, orangey red, with flowers?”
Jon shrugged. “I won’t see it at night.”
“Oh, god. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Should we do this one, then?” Instead of closing the door, Martin swung it the rest of the way open, then strode back to Jon’s side of the corridor, arm already outstretched. Jon managed to stand before Martin could reach him, but, as it had done outside, his vision went dark for a few seconds. He felt Martin’s hand on his shoulder before he could see his frown.
“You alright?” Martin asked yet again.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“It’s just—you don’t usually blink anymore, except for effect.”
“Oh.”
Out there, none of the watchers blinked. At first, soon after the change, Martin had asked Jon to try, “Because it just feels so weird. Like I’m under constant scrutiny. Literally constant, Jon. You get why that feels weird, right?” (Jon had agreed—sincerely, though he wondered why Martin needed to ask that question in a world whose central conceit was that being watched felt weird. He’d also chosen not to point out that his scrutiny, like that of Jonah Magnus, was not, technically, constant, since he did sometimes look at other things. But he still rehearsed this retort in his mind every time he remembered that conversation.) Turned out it was hard to time your blinks properly when your eyeballs didn’t need the moisture. He’d forget about it for who knew how long, then remember and overcompensate by blinking so often Martin at first thought he was exaggerating it on purpose as a joke. It got old fast, in Jon’s opinion, but even after he learnt Jon didn’t intend it as a joke Martin still found it funny. “You’re doing it again,” he’d say every time, shoulders wiggling. Eventually Jon had asked him,
“You know you don’t blink anymore either, right?”
“Oh god, don’t I?” When Jon shook his head, with a smile whose teeth he tried to keep covered, Martin squeezed his own eyes shut and pushed their lids back and forth with his fingers. “Ugh—gross!” And for the next half hour he’d done the whole forget-to-blink-for-five-minutes-then-do-it-ten-times-in-as-many-seconds routine, too. After that they had both agreed to pretend not to notice the lack of blinking. Jon figured he couldn’t hold it against Martin that he’d broken this rule though, since Jon himself had broken it first, on their first morning here:
“You blinked,” he had informed Martin as he watched him stir sugar into his tea. Martin, who had not only blinked but broken eye contact to make sure he dropped the sugar cube in the right place, replied with a scoff,
“Didn’t know it was a staring contest.”
“No, I mean—”
“Oh! I blinked!”
“…Right,” Jon said now. “I’m—it’s nothing.”
Martin sighed. He closed his eyes, but probably rolled them under their lids. Jon used the inspection of their new room as an excuse to look away, but took in nothing other than the presence of a large bed and the flowered wallpaper Martin had warned him about.
“‘Kay. If you’re sure.”
Taking a seat at the foot of the bed, Jon looked down at his grass-stained knees and prepared himself to ask, Look, does it matter? I’m about to lie down anyway, so, functionally speaking, yes, I am fine.
“So, you’ll be okay here for a bit while I go figure out what to do about the door?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. I’ll come check on you as soon as I know anything, yeah?”
“Of course.”
“Although—if you’re asleep, should I wake you up?”
“Yes,” Jon replied before Martin had even got the last word out. He heard a short, emphatic exhale, presumably of laughter. “Wait—how would you know, anyway?”
“Oh. Yeah, good point.”
Jon looked down at his shoes. His fingers throbbed in anticipation, but he figured he should spare Martin the horror of getting grass stains on a second bedroom’s counterpane. The first shoe he pulled off without untying, since he could step on its heel with the other one. But he had to bend over to reach the second one’s incongruously bright white laces, biting his lip when he felt his right femur poke past the bounds of its socket as between a cage’s bars. On his way back up his vision quivered like a heat mirage, but didn’t go dark. He scooched himself up to the head of the bed. Made sure to face the ceiling rather than the red wallpaper.
A few months into his tenure in the Archives, Jon had discovered that if you close your eyes at your desk, even just for a minute, you can trick your whole body into thinking you’ve been gentle with it. But that trick didn’t work anymore. Out there, this made sense; interposing his eyelids between himself and the world’s new horrors couldn’t push them out of his consciousness, any more than it had helped to close the curtains at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin’s sentimental attachment to sleep had baffled him, as had his insistence on closing his eyes even though they’d pop back open as soon as his body went limp. Here, though, Jon sympathized with Martin’s wish. He too missed that magic link between closed eyes and sleep. Probably he should just be grateful for this rest from knowing other people’s suffering? The thing he had wished to close his eyes against was gone here. But now that most of his bodily wants had synced up with his actions again, it felt… wrong, like a tangible loss, that he couldn’t assert It’s time for rest now by closing his eyelids. That it took effort to keep them joined. Jon even found himself missing the crust that used to stick them together on mornings after long sleep.
That should have been his first sensation on waking, their first morning here. After seventy-one hours his eyelids should’ve been practically super-glued together. Instead, they’d apparently stayed open the entire time. It wasn’t uncomfortable—he hadn’t woken up with them smarting or anything. Hadn’t noticed one way or the other; after all, when not forced awake by an alarm, one rarely notices the moment one opens one’s eyes in the morning. He just didn’t like knowing that he looked the same waking and sleeping. It didn’t make sense. The dreams hadn’t followed him here, so what was he watching? He could see nothing but the ceiling.
He rolled over, hoping to look out the window. Doors, technically. Between gauzy curtains he could make out only wrought-iron bars and the tops of a few trees. A nice view, he could tell; when he got his second wind he was sure he’d find it pretty. For now he wondered how much more energy debt he had put himself in by rolling over.
Drowning in debt? We can help!
How had he not foreseen how horrible it would be inside the Buried? The inability to move or speak without pain and loss of breath—“Just imagine,” he muttered sarcastically to the empty air, as though addressing his past self. “What might that be like.” He’d lived for years with the weight of exhaustion on his back—heavier at that time than it’d ever been before. And he knew how it felt to risk injury with every movement. What an odd frame of mind he must have lived in then, to think his magic healing wouldn’t let him get scratched up down there. Had he thought it would protect him from fear? I must save my friend from this horrible place! But also, If I get stuck there forever, no big deal; I deserve it, after all. There seemed something so arrogant about that now, that idea that deserving pain could somehow mitigate it. That because monsterhood made him less innocent, it would make him less of a victim. How could he have thought that, when he’d known pulling her out of there didn’t mean he forgave her? He should apologize to Daisy for—
Right. Nope, never mind.
He began to regret rolling over. If he planned to stay on his side like this for long, he shouldn’t leave his shoulder and hip dangling. He could already feel their joints beginning to slide apart. But his body had started to drift to that faraway place from which no grievance ever seemed urgent enough to recall it—neither pain now nor the threat of greater pain later. Nor the three cups of tea he’d drunk.
After he and Martin had fallen asleep on Salesa’s doorstep, Jon had vague memories of being led up the stairs to their bedroom, though he remembered neither being shaken awake nor getting into bed. Just a seventy-odd-hour blank spot, followed by pain of a kind he had thought he’d left behind.
It wasn’t that watchers couldn’t feel pain, after the change. They could, but it was like how real-world pain felt through the veil of a dream. Your actions didn’t affect it as directly as they should. In the Necropolis Martin had asked him, “How exactly does a leg wound make you faster?” If he’d had the courage to answer, at the time he would have said something about his own wounds not seeming important now that he had to tune out those of the whole world. That wasn’t it though, he knew now. Pain just worked differently out there. When Daisy attacked him, it had hurt—but the wound she left him hadn’t protested movement. Not until he and Martin entered the grounds of Upton House. You could bear weight on an injured leg just fine out there, because it wouldn’t hurt more when you stood on it than otherwise.
Sometimes, when his joints slid apart while he slept, he could still feel it in his dreams. Up until 13th January 2016 (for months after which date he dreamt Naomi Herne’s graveyard and nothing else), his sleeping mind used to craft scenarios to explain its own pain and panic to itself. Running from an exploding grenade, staying awake through surgery, that sort of thing. But over the years, as the sensation grew familiar, his dreams about it became less urgent, their anxieties more mundane. He’d shout for help from passing cars, then feel like he’d lied to the stranger who opened their door to him when it turned out running to get in the car hurt no more than standing still.
Even before the change, it’d been ages since he’d had to worry about that. Since the coma, Beholding had fixed all these accidents, the way it’d fixed the finger he tried to chop off. They wouldn’t reset with a clunk, the way they had when he used to fix them by hand. It was more like his body reverted to a version the Eye had saved before the moment of injury. When he tried to pull open a Push door he’d hear the first clunk, followed by about half a second of pain, then after a gentle burst of static—nothing. Just a door handle between his fingers that needed pushing. If he tripped on uneven pavement he might still go down, but his ankle wouldn’t hurt when he stood back up, and the scrapes on his hands would heal before he could inspect them. Here, though, in this place the Eye couldn’t see, Jon lacked such protections. He didn’t have the dreams either? And that was more than worth it as a tradeoff, he was sure. But it still smarted to remember that pain had been his first sensation waking up in an oasis. Not birdsong, not sunshine striped across linen, not the warm weight of another person next to him. He knew he’d come back to a place ruled by physics rather than fear because he’d woken up with gaps between his bones.
“Jon? Are you awake?”
“Hm? Oh. Yes.”
“Cool.” Martin sat down on what felt like the corner of bed nearest the door. “I think I know how to do this now.”
“How to put the doorknob back on?”
“Yeah. God, I still can’t believe it twisted clean off in my hand like that. With no warning—like, zero to sixty in less than a second. I mean, can you believe our luck? The thing’s perfectly functional, and then suddenly it just—comes off!”
“Er…”
“Oh, god, sorry—I didn’t mean—”
“What? Oh—hrkgh”—Jon rolled around to face Martin, hoping the little yelp he let out when his leg slopped back into joint would sound like a noise of exasperation rather than pain. He found Martin sat looking down at the severed doorknob which poked up from between his knees. “No, Martin, of course not, I know—”
“Still, I’m sorry about—”
“No, it’s—it’s fine?”
On that first morning, Jon had managed to get his limbs screwed back on properly without making enough noise to wake up Martin. He’d limped out of their room and down the hall, pushing doors open until he’d found a toilet, whereupon he sat to pee and marveled that the flush and sink still worked. It was bright enough inside that he hadn’t thought to try the light switch on his way in—too busy contorting his neck to look for the sun out the window. On his way out, though, he flicked it on, then off. Then on again and off again. How could it work, when there was no power grid the house could connect to? Automatically Jon tried to search his mind’s Eye for a domain based in a power plant or something. Right, no, of course—that power did not work here.
When he got back to their room he found Martin awake. “Oh—morning,” Jon told him with a shy laugh.
“It—it is morning, isn’t it,” Martin marveled. Then he asked if Jon could hand him the map sticking out of his backpack’s side pocket. (What good are maps when the very Earth logic no longer applied here, after all. But Martin was rubbish at geography, so Jon still had to provide the You Are Here sign with his finger for him.) Jon grabbed the map on his way back to bed, and was about to tell him about the miracles of plumbing and electricity he’d just witnessed—not to mention the bathtub he’d admired on the long trek from toilet to sink—when Martin frowned and asked, “Why are you limping?”
“Am I?” Jon had shrugged, then cleared his throat when the motion made his shoulder audibly click. “Daisy, must be.”
“No, Jon. That’s the wrong leg.”
He slid both legs out of sight under the blankets and handed Martin the map. “It’s nothing. It just… came off a bit. Last night."
Before Jon could add It’s fixed now though, Martin said, “I’m sorry, what?”
Jon had assumed Martin understood the kind of thing he meant, but that he’d misled him as to its degree—i.e., that Martin objected to his talking about a full hip dislocation like it mattered less than what happened with Daisy. So he’d said,
“No, sorry, not all the way off—”
And Martin just laughed. “What, and you taped it back up like—like an old computer cable?”
“Sort of, yeah? It—it does still work, more or less.”
“Right, of course. No need to get a new one, yet; you can just limp along with this one. No big deal! Just make sure you don’t pull too hard on it.”
“I mean.” By now he could sense Martin’s sarcasm, his bitterness; that didn’t mean he knew what to do with them. So he'd said with a huff of laughter, “I can’t just send for a new one. That’s—that’s not how bodies work. You have to….” Wait for it to sort itself out was the natural end to that sentence. But he hadn’t been sure he could say that without opening a can of worms.
“Wait so… what actually happened? Are you okay?”
Only at this point had Jon recognized Martin’s response as one of incomprehension. What happened exactly? he had asked, too, when Jon told him the ice-cream anecdote. Did no one ever listen when you told them about these things?
“Nothing. Never mind. It’s fine.”
“Oh come on.”
“It’s. Fine! It’s not important.”
And then for days Martin kept alluding to it. Like some kind of reminder to Jon that he hadn’t opened up, disguised as a joke. Every time something came out or fell down he’d mutter, “So it came off, you might say.” Eventually they’d fallen out over it, and now neither one could come near the phrase without this song and dance.
“Don’t worry about it, Martin,” Jon assured him now; “I’m over it.”
“…Uh huh. Well, putting that to one side for the moment—I think I can fix this?”
“Oh? Great!—”
“—Yeah! It should be simple, actually. I think I just need to replace the screw that fell out? I mean, there doesn’t seem to be anything actually broken, just, you know,” with an awkward laugh, “the screw lives on the wrong side of the door now. But if we can just put a new one in the door should be fine.” He looked to Jon as if for help plotting their next steps.
“I—I don’t, um. Think we have one.”
Martin’s shoulders dropped; the corners of his mouth tightened. “Yeah, I know we don’t have one, Jon. I just mean, we need to find out where Salesa keeps them.”
“Oh!” Jon replied, in a brighter tone. Then he registered what this meant. “Oh. Right.”
“Y…eah.”
“Any idea where to look?”
They checked what seemed to Martin the most obvious place first. Salesa used one of the ground-floor drawing rooms as a sort of repository for everything he’d left as yet unpacked—all the practical items he hadn’t been able to repurpose as toys, plus some antiques he’d been too fond of or too nervous to part with. Two nights ago, Salesa had noticed the state of Jon’s and Martin’s shoelaces, and insisted they let him replace them with some from this little warehouse. “Please, come with me; I’ve nothing to hide. You can have a look around, see if I have anything that might help you on your journey….” As he said this he’d counted to two on his fingers, as though listing off attractions they should be sure not to miss.
Jon watched Martin perk right up at this. All week Salesa had kept pleading with them to tell him about any luxuries they had wanted while touring the apocalypse, so he could try to find something to fulfill those wants. “Well, I—I don’t know about luxuries,” Martin had ventured the third time this came up. “But I do think we might run out of bandages soon, so. If you’ve any extra?”
“Of course, of course, yes, how prudent of you, always with one eye on the future. Must be the Beholding in you.” (Neither Jon nor Martin knew what to say to that.) “But there will be plenty of time for that. I meant something for now, while you are here, while you don’t need to think of things like that.” And sure enough, each time Salesa had come to them with presents from his little warehouse (booze, butterfly nets, more booze, antique bathing suits, &c.), he’d forgot about Martin’s homely request for gauze and tape. Martin insisted they change the dressing on Jon’s leg every day; by now they’d run through the bandages he brought from Daisy’s safehouse. So when Salesa suggested they accompany him to his repository, Martin said,
“Sure, yeah! That sounds really helpful.” (Salesa clutched his heart as though he’d waited all his life to hear such praise.) “Er. The things in your warehouse, though. They’re not L—um.” Leitners, Martin had almost called them. “You don’t think they’ll develop any… strange properties, when we leave here, do you?”
“Of course not,” Salesa had answered, stopping and turning all the way around in the corridor to face Martin with a frown. “Martin, I promise, only my antiques are cursed—and even then, not all of them.” He’d resumed the walk toward his little warehouse, but turned around again and held up a hand, as if to preempt a question. “There are, indeed, yes, some items out there, touched by the Corruption, which can pass their infection on to other things they come in contact with. But, no,” he went on, his voice fighting off a joyous laugh, “no, the only item I have like that does almost the opposite.”
“Oh.”
Salesa nodded, but did not turn around this time. “Strange little thing. It’s an antique syringe that, so long as you keep it near you, repels the Crawling Rot. I like to think it helped dispatch that insect thing Annabelle chased away. But if you try to get rid of it,” he added in a darker tone, “all the sickness, the bugs, the smells, even stains on your clothes—everything disgusting that it’s kept away—they remember who you are, and they hunger for you more than anyone else. The man who sold it to me….” He shook his head ruefully, hand now resting on the door.
“Was eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Jon muttered.
“Something like that, yes,” said Salesa, as he jerked open the door.
Jon hated the way his and Martin’s shoes looked now. He hadn’t had to put new laces on a pair of old, dirty shoes since he was a kid, and the contrast looked wrong—the same way starched collars and slicked-back hair on kids look wrong. Jon’s trainers were gray, their laces a slightly darker gray, so these white ones wouldn’t have looked quite right even without the dirt. Martin’s had once been white, but their original laces were broad and flat, while these were narrow and more rounded. The replacements’ thin, clinical white lines looked something between depressing and menacing. Too much like spider web; too much like the stitching on Nikola’s minions. When they came undone on this morning’s walk, Jon had made sure to tread on them in the mud a few times before tying them back up. Poor Dr. Thompson’s syringe must have retained some of its power here, though, because they still looked pristine. Jon wondered if it had no effect on spiders, or if without it this whole place would have been draped in cobwebs.
Martin seemed pleased with their haul, though. Despite Salesa’s amnesia on the subject, his little warehouse held more plasters, gauze, medical tape, antibacterial ointment, alcohol wipes—the list went on—than one man could ever use. In a strange, raw moment Jon liked to pretend he hadn’t seen, Salesa had wrung his hands as his eyes passed over this hoard. His lip had quivered. He’d practically begged Martin to take the whole lot away with them. “What harm will come to me here? And if it does come, what good will it do, protecting one lonely old man from skinned knees and paper cuts? The two of you—where you are going—the gravity of your mission!” At this point he’d seized one of each their hands. “Everything I have that even might help, you must take it. Please.”
“I—yeah,” Martin stuttered. “This is—really helpful, yeah. We’ll take as much as we can fit in our bags.”
Salesa had let go their hands by this point, and crossed his arms. “Right, yes, bags, of course, the bags. Are you sure you don’t want my truck?”
“Oh, well, thanks, but I don’t think either of us knows how to—”
“To drive a truck?” Salesa uncrossed his arms and began to reach for Martin’s shoulder. “I could teach you—”
“It won’t work without the camera anyway,” pointed out Jon. “We have to walk.”
Martin sighed. ”That too. ‘The journey will be the journey,’ as Jon keeps saying.”
“I said that once,” Jon protested.
No such success on this return visit. They found a small pile of miscellaneous screws, one of which Martin said would work (though it was the wrong color, he alleged, and had clearly been meant for some other purpose), but the screwdriver they needed remained elusive. “I mean, I can’t be sure they’re not in here—the place is as bad as Gertrude’s storage unit. We could spend all day here and still not be sure—”
“Let’s not do that,” said Jon, pushing an always-warm candlestick with a pool of always-melted wax out of Martin’s way with his sleeve for what felt like the hundredth time.
“No arguments here.”
“Where to next?”
“I guess it makes sense that they’re not here. This room’s all stuff Salesa brought, and why would he bring home-repair stuff when he didn’t even know where he’d wind up.”
“Except for the screws.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t look like he keeps screws here, remember? There’s just a couple random ones lying around, like he forgot to put them away or something.”
Jon peered between the clouds in his mind, trying to catch sight of Martin’s thought train. “So you’re saying the screwdriver should be…?”
“Somewhere less… frequented, I guess? They’ll probably still be wherever they were when Salesa found the place.”
“Not somewhere that was open to the public, then.”
Martin sighed. ”I mean yeah, probably. Not that that narrows it down much.”
“Somewhere… banal, less posh.”
“Not sure how much less posh you can get than this place. But yeah, I guess. Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. Odd that his eyes weren’t immune to dust, when leaving them open for seventy straight hours hadn’t bothered them. And why didn’t the syringe keep dust away? In Dr. Snow’s day (not far removed from Smirke’s, n.b.), Jon seemed to recall that dust had been used as a euphemism for all waste, including the human kind Dr. Snow had found in the cholera water. It was like how people today use filth—hence the word dustbin. And hadn’t Elias once called the Corruption Filth? Jon opened his eyes and watched Martin swirl back to full color. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here,” he concluded.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.”
“Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?”
Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice.
“Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him.
“Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.”
“Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.”
Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?
“Oh—I know,” Martin said, clicking his fingers and pointing them at Jon like a gun. “We passed a shed this morning, remember?”
Jon squinted. “Not even remotely.”
“No yeah—on our walk with Salesa. I tried to ask him what it was for, but he kept droning on and on. By the time he stopped talking I’d forgot about it.”
“Huh,” said Jon, to show he was listening.
“That seems like a good place to keep screws and all, right? If it’s so nondescript you can’t even remember it.”
“Sure.”
“Great! Are you ready now, or d’you need to sit for a bit longer?”
“I’m ready.” This time he accepted Martin’s hand, not keen to trip on something cursed.
“Anyway, if we don’t find them and Salesa’s still out there, we can ask him on the way back.”
Jon’s heart shrunk before the prospect of inviting Salesa to be the hero of their story. Please, Mr. Salesa, save us from our screwdriver-less hell! They would never hear the end of it. It would inevitably remind the old man of the countless times in his youth when he’d been the only man in the antiques trade who knew where to find some priceless treasure. Let Salesa open their stuck door and they’d find Pandora’s bloody box of stories behind it. He winced and let out a grunt as of pain before he could stop himself. “Let’s not tell him, if we can help it.”
“Of course we should tell him,” Martin protested. “We can’t just leave it broken like this.”
“But if we can fix it without his help—?”
“What? No! Even then, he’s our host. We have to tell him. It’s his door, he deserves to know its—I don’t know, history?” Martin sighed, shoving one hand in his hair and holding out the other. “If he’s got a doorknob whose screw comes loose a lot, he should know that, so he can tighten it next time before it gets out of hand. I mean, we’re lucky it only chipped the paint when it—when it fell off, you know?” (Jon, for his part, hadn’t even noticed this chip of paint Martin referred to.) “And—and suppose he’s only got this one screw left,” tapping the one in his pocket, “and the next time it happens his last screw rolls under the door like this one did.”
“And what is he supposed to do to prevent that scenario? There aren’t exactly any hardware stores in the apocalypse.”
Big sigh. “Yeah, fair enough. I still think we should tell him. It just feels wrong to hide secrets from him about his own house, you know?”
“Fine,” sighed Jon in turn. ”Should we tell him about the scorch marks on the window sill as well?”
“No?” Martin turned to him with an incredulous look. “Tell me you’re joking.”
“I mean—I was, but—”
“Please tell me you get how that’s different.”
“Enlighten me,” Jon said wearily.
“Seriously? Of course you don’t tell him about the?—those were already there! If we’d put them there, then yeah, of course we’d need to tell him.”
“So it’s about confessing your guilt, then. Not about what Salesa makes of the information.”
“I mean, I guess?” Martin looked perplexed, lips drawn into his mouth. “Actually, no. Because those are just scorch marks, they don’t—you can still get into a room with scorch marks on the windowsill, Jon.”
“And yet if you’d left them you’d tell him about it?”
“Well yeah but if I told him about it now it’d just be like I was—leaving him a bad review, or something. It’d just be rude. ‘Lovely place you have, Salesa. So kind of you to share your limited provisions with us refugees from the apocalypse. Too bad you gave us a room whose windowsill could use repainting!’”
Jon laughed. “Yes, alright, I get it.”
Martin’s sigh of relief seemed only a little exaggerated. If he hadn’t wiped pretend sweat from his brow Jon might have bought it. “Okay, that’s good, ‘cause”—when Jon kept laughing, Martin cut himself off. “Hang on, were you joking this whole time?”
“Sort of?”
“Were you just playing devil’s advocate or something?”
“I mean—not exactly? For the first seventy or eighty percent of it I was completely serious.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. It was just—fun. It felt nice to take a definite sta—aaaa-a-aa.” Something in Jon’s lower back went wrong somehow. An SI joint, probably? The pain caught him so much by surprise that when he stepped with that side’s leg he stumbled forward.
“Whoa!” Martin’s hand closed around his upper arm. Jon yelped again, from panic more than hurt this time, as his shoulder thunked in its socket. “Jon! Are you okay?”
“Don’t do that,” Jon hissed, trying lamely to shake his arm out of Martin’s grip. It didn’t work. The attempt just made his own arm ache, and produce more ominous clunking sounds.
“I—what?”
“It was fine. I don’t need you to catch me.”
Martin let his arm go. “You were about to fall on your face, Jon.”
“I’d already caught myself—just fine—with this.” He gestured to his cane, stirring its handle like a joystick.
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“I don’t know, look?”
“It’s not—?” Martin scoffed. “Look when? It’s not like a rational calculation. I can’t just go ‘Beep. Beep. See human trip. Will human fall on face? If yes, press A to catch! If not, press B to’— what, stand there and do nothing? It’s just human nature; when you see someone falling that’s just what you do. I’m not going to apologize for not calculating the risk properly.”
“Fine! Yes, okay, you’re right. Forget I said anything.” Throwing up his free hand in defeat, Jon set off again—tried to stride, but it was hard to do that with a limp. Even with his cane, he couldn’t step evenly enough to achieve a decisive gait.
It was fine, Jon reminded himself. He’d had this injury (if you could call it that) a thousand times before. When it came on suddenly like this it never stuck around long. Sure, yeah, for now every step hurt like an urgent crisis. But any second it would right itself as quickly as it had come undone.
“No, no, I understand! Point taken! Note to future Martin,” the latter shouted from behind Jon, voice troubled by hurried steps; “next time let him fall and break his bloody nose.”
Trusting Martin to shout directions if he went the wrong way, Jon pressed on, rehearsing comebacks in his mind. Is this not a boundary I’m allowed to set? You don’t let me read statements in front of you. Isn’t that part of human—isn’t that my nature, too?
Oh, yes, human nature, that must be it. You didn’t lunge after Salesa at ping-pong the other day, did you? I saw you opening doors for Melanie when she got back from India. You stopped for a while, did you know that? You all did, everyone in the Archives. And then—it’s the strangest thing!—you all started up again after Delano. Maybe you lot don’t see the common factor here; people always do seem to think it’s more polite not to notice.
So what if I had broken my nose? You nearly broke my shoulder, catching me like that. Does that not matter because you can’t see it? Because it wouldn’t scar?
They were all too petty to say aloud. Too incongruous with the quiet. He could hear his own footsteps, and Martin’s, and the clank of his cane’s metal segments each time it hit the ground, and a few crows exclaiming about something exciting they’d found on his right. Nothing else.
“Looks like Salesa went inside,” Martin shouted from behind him.
Jon stopped walking and turned around. “What?”
“Left a couple things out here, but yeah.” Martin jogged to catch up with him, from a greater distance than Jon would have expected given how much limping slowed him down. He must have veered off course to inspect the clearing Salesa had vacated. In one hand he carried an empty wine glass by its stem, which he lifted to show Jon.
“Huh.”
“Yeah.” When he caught up with Jon, Martin stood still and panted. “Guess it won’t be as easy to ask him about it as we thought. If we don’t find what we need in there,” he added, glancing demonstratively to something behind Jon.
Following Martin’s eyes, Jon finally saw the shed. Nondescript boards, worn black and white by the elements. Surrounded by hedges three months overgrown.
Turned out it wasn’t a shed anymore, though—Salesa had converted it to a chicken coop. “Explains the boiled eggs,” shrugged Jon.
“God, they’re adorable. Do you think it’s okay to pet one?” Martin crouched in front of a black hen with a puffball of feathers on top of her head. (Martin called her a hen, anyway, and Jon trusted his authority on animals other than cats). “I don’t really know, er, ch—hicken etiquette,” he mused, voice shot through with nervous laughter.
The black hen sat alone in a little box, and didn't seem to want attention. A little red one they’d found strutting around the coop, however, ventured right up to Martin and cocked her head, like she expected him to give her a present. While Martin cooed over her and the other chickens, Jon went outside and laid flat on his back in the grass under a tree. “Take your time,” he shouted. “I’m happy here.”
Sure enough, when Martin emerged from the coop and helped him stand back up, whatever cog in Jon’s pelvis or spine he had jammed earlier was turning again. And by the time they got back to the house, Martin had talked himself into the idea that maybe all the house’s doorknobs that looked like theirs came loose a lot, and Salesa had taken to keeping the screwdriver to fix them in, say, the hall closet, or in their toilet’s under-sink cabinet.
“I think we’re gonna have to find Salesa and ask him about it,” concluded Martin, when these locations turned up nothing they wanted either.
“If you’re sure.”
Jon sat down on the closed toilet seat. Hadn’t that been what he said just before the last time he sat down on the lid of a toilet before Martin? He’d dutifully turned away, that time, as Martin undressed, wanting to make sure he knew he’d still let him have some privacy. But then, of course: “Where should I put these, do you think? —Er, my clothes I mean.”
“Oh. Um.” Jon had turned his head to look at the stain on Daisy’s ceiling, for what must have been the tenth time already. “I can hold onto them if you like.” Which then meant Martin had to get them back on before Jon could undress for his own shower and hand him his clothes. As he’d piled his trousers into Martin’s hands a tape recorder fell out of one pocket and crashed to the floor, ejecting the tape with Peter’s statement on it. “Shit,” Jon had hissed and ducked to the floor to pick it up, trusting the slit in his towel to reveal nothing worse than thigh.
“Shit,” Martin echoed. “I hope that wasn’t your phone.”
“No—just the recorder.” Still on the floor, Jon clicked its little door shut and pressed play. Sound of waves, static, footsteps. He switched it off. “Seems alright.” Thank god, he stopped himself from adding. Jon didn’t want to lose this one, this record of how he’d found Martin, in case he lost him again. But he didn’t want Martin to hear the sounds of the Lonely again so soon, either. That was why he’d stayed with Martin while he showered, rather than waiting in the safehouse living room. He wouldn’t have insisted on it, of course. He didn’t exactly believe Martin would disappear again? But long showers were such a cliché of lonely people, and steam looked so much like the mist on Peter’s beach, and when Jon asked how he felt about it, Martin said that thought hadn’t occurred to him,
“But as soon as you started to say that, I.” He’d stood with his teeth bared, half smiling half grimacing, and bringing the tips of his fingers together and apart over and over. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Heh—it scares me too now, if I’m honest. That’s… a good sign, I guess, right?”
They had come a long way since then, Jon told himself. They were more comfortable with each other now. On their first morning here, they’d showered separately, but after (Martin’s) breakfast Jon’s irritation had faded and he had resolved to pretend along with Martin that this was a holiday. So they’d got to use the enormous bathtub after all— the one at whose soap dish Jon now found himself staring as he sat on the lid of the toilet. When the heat made him dizzier, as he’d known it would, he had relished getting to rest his cheek on Martin’s arm along the rim of the tub, where it had grown cool and soft in the few minutes he’d kept it above the water.
“Let’s have lunch first,” Martin said now; “you’re getting all….” While he looked for the right word he dropped his shoulders and jaw, and mimicked a thousand-yard stare. “Abstract, again. Distant. People food should help a little, yeah? Tie you back down to this plane a bit?”
“Probably,” Jon agreed, smiling at Martin’s tact.
But to get to the kitchen they had to pass through the dining room—where they found Salesa snoring in a chair at the head of the table. “Let’s just ask him now before he gets up and moves again,” maintained Martin. Jon shrugged his acquiescence and leant in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. Why hadn’t he used the toilet before letting Martin lead him here?
”Um, Mikaele?” Martin inched a few steps toward him, but a distance of several feet still gaped between them. “We have something to ask you, if that’s—hello? Mikaele?”
A likely-sounding gap between snores—but nope. Still sound asleep. Salesa sighed, licked his lips, then began to snore again.
“Mikaele Salesa,” called out Jon from his post at the door, rather less gently. “Mikaele Salesa!” He turned to Martin, meaning to suggest that they eat now and trust the smell of food to wake Salesa, but stopped himself when he saw Martin creeping timidly toward Salesa with his hand outstretched.
“Sorry to disturbyouMikaele,” Martin squeaked out, so quickly that the words blended together. He gave Salesa’s shoulder the lightest possible tap with one fingertip, then snatched his hand back with a grimace of regret as Salesa’s own hand reached up, belatedly, as if to swat Martin’s away. “Oh, good, you’re—”
Salesa interrupted with a snore. Martin sighed and turned to Jon. “What d’you think? Should I shake him?”
Jon pulled out a neighboring chair and sat on it. “No need for anything so drastic. Try poking him a few more times first.”
“Right.”
Once he’d tired of rolling his cane between his palms Jon bent down to set it on the floor. He’d learnt his lesson about trying to hang it on the back of these chairs, though in this fog it had taken several incidents to stick. Every time it ended up crashing to the floor, when he scooched his chair back or when Martin tried to reach an arm around him. Then again—he conjectured, bent halfway to the floor with the cane still in his hand—if he did drop it, that might wake Salesa.
Two nights ago Jon had got up to use the toilet, and knocked his cane down from the wall on his way back to bed in the dark. It crashed to the floor; Jon swore and hopped on one foot back from it, imagining the other foot’s poor toenail smashed to jagged pieces as it thumped to life with pain. Meanwhile he heard rustling from the bed, and Martin’s voice, querulous with sleep. “Jon? Jon, what’s—happened, what—are you.”
“Nothing it’s fine go back to”—he’d hissed as his knee decided it had enough of hopping—“don’t get up, just. I’m gonna turn on the light, if that’s alright.”
“What fell? Are you okay?”
“The cane. I knocked it over in the dark.”
“Oh.”
He got no verbal response about the light, but guessed Martin had nodded.
From a distance his toe looked alright—no blood, anyway, so he could walk on it without risking the carpet. Jon picked his cane up from the floor and steered himself to the foot of the bed, where he sat down. His toenail had chipped, it looked like—only a little, but in that way that leaves a long crack. If he tried to pick it straight he’d tear out a big chunk and it would bleed. But if he left it like this it would snag on the sheets, on his socks, until some loose thread tore the chunk of nail off for him. What could he do for this kind of thing here? At home he’d file the nail down around the chip, then cover it in clear nail polish, and just hope that’d hold out until the crack grew out and he could clip it without bleeding. But here? A plaster would have to do, he guessed. They had plenty of those now.
Jon hated bandaging, ever since Prentiss—in much the same way that Martin hated sleeping in his pants. He’d had time to learn all its discomforts. How sweaty they got, the way they stuck to your hairs, the way lint collected in the adhesive residue they left. Didn’t help he associated them with that time of paranoia. They didn’t make him act paranoid, understand; he just habitually thought of bandage-wearing as what paranoid people do. It made an echo of his contempt for that time’s Jon cling to his perceptions of current Jon. On his first morning here, when the ones on his shin where Daisy’d bit him peeled off in the shower, he hadn’t bothered to replace them. After all, the bite only hurt when something pulled on it or poked or scraped against it, so he figured his trousers would provide enough protective barrier.
“That healed fast,” Martin had remarked, when he noticed the undressed wound in the bath—and then, when he looked again, “Yyyyeah I dunno, I think you might still want to bandage that. We don’t want dirt getting in there.”
“Do I have to?”
“Humor me.”
When they got back to their room he’d let Martin dress it himself. Martin had sucked air through his teeth. “This is days old—it shouldn’t be all hot and red like this.” According to him these were early signs of infection, which would get worse if they didn’t take better care of it—i.e., keep the wound freshly bandaged and ointmented. Jon refrained from pointing out that when the cut on his throat had got like that he’d left it uncovered and been fine. But he did ask what worse meant. “Really bad,” testified Martin. “I had a cut on my finger get infected once. Really disgusting. You don’t want to know.”
Jon smiled at him, raised his eyebrows. “After Jared’s mortal garden I think I can handle it.”
Martin smiled too, but wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “There was pus involved.”
“Oh, god! How could you tell me that!” gasped Jon, hand to his chest.
“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it also hurt? A lot? And it can make you ill. So we should try to avoid it, yeah?”
He’d tried to disavow the disappointment in his sigh by exaggerating it. “Yes, alright.”
“Don’t know why you’d want to leave it exposed anyway. Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Well, sure, when you do that,” Jon had muttered, flinching away. As he asked the question Martin had lightly tapped the skin around the gash through its new bandage. A second or two later Jon added, “Less than when I got it? It’s hard to tell; it’s… different here.”
With a sigh that caught on phlegm and irritation, Martin asked, “Different how?”
He hadn’t been able to answer then, but he knew now, of course. It hurt the way things do when you’re awake. Not with the constant smart and throb it had when he’d first got it, but, it snagged on things now. Had opinions on how he moved. When he bent his knee more than ninety degrees, that stretched the skin around it painfully. Also if he knelt, since then the floor would press against it through his trousers. And stepping with that foot felt odd. Didn’t hurt, exactly, but sort of… rattled? Like a bad bruise would. This all seemed so small, compared to the moment of terror for his life that he’d felt when Daisy bit into him—that gaping wound in his new self-conception, which his healing powers had sewn up so quickly. The ritual of bandaging it every evening seemed so otiose, so laughably superstitious. He despised the thought of adding another step to it.
While Jon went on examining his toe, Martin asked, “What was the... thumping. It sounded like.”
“Oh—no—I didn’t fall; it’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“No—yes—stop, it’s nothing, don’t get up. I just forgot I left it on the—leaning against the doorwall” (he hadn’t decided in time whether to say doorway or wall and ended up with half of each) “so I walked into it, er, toe first.”
“Oh,” Martin said again. Jon could hear him subsiding against the pillows behind him. “It came down?”
Big sigh. Jon’s fingernails met his palms. He set his foot back on the floor, and when his hip whined in its socket he clenched his teeth and kept them that way. In his mind he heard days’ worth of similar jokes. When he couldn’t get a jammed jar open: So you’re saying it wouldn’t… come off? When they got back their clean laundry: Can you believe all those grass stains came out?—oh, sorry: that they came off, I meant. Always with an innocent laugh, like Jon’s original phrasing had been just, what, like a Freudian slip, rather than something perfectly comprehensible that Martin had refused to engage with, taken from him, and rendered meaningless on purpose. “No it did not,” he snapped, “and I would appreciate it if you’d quit throwing that back in my face.”
“Whoa, uh. O…kay. What’s… going on here exactly?”
“You—?”
His heart plummeted; his face stung with embarrassment. Came down, Martin had said—not came off. He’d just been confirming that Jon’s cane had fallen down.
“Oh, god—nothing, never mind. You did nothing.”
“Well that’s obviously not true.”
“I just—I thought you’d said ‘came off.’ I thought you meant, had my toe ‘come off.’”
“Oh,” said Martin, yet again. When Jon turned to look he found him still blinking and squinting against the light. “Do you… need me to not say that anymore?”
“Not when I—?” Not when I’ve hurt myself, Jon meant. But Martin hadn’t done that, so this grievance didn’t actually mean anything. He’d been seeing patterns where there were none, and now that he’d seen through the illusion Jon knew again that Martin never would say it like that. “No, it’s fine. Do whatever you want.”
Martin turned the tail end of his yawn into a huff of false laughter. “Nope. Still don’t believe you.”
“Everything you’ve said makes perfect sense with the information you have. It’s all just—me. Being cryptic again.”
“Okay, uh. Are you waiting for me to disagree? ‘Cause, uh. Yup—you’re still being cryptic. No arguments there.”
Jon just sighed, really scraping the back of his throat with it. Almost a scoff.
“Sooo do you wanna fill me in, or.”
“No?” With an incredulous laugh. “Well, yes, just.”
He hadn’t known how to start from there, while so tightly wound and defensive. It seemed cruel to raise such a sensitive subject when Martin sounded so eager to go back to sleep. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear Martin whimper apologies. Didn’t want to deal with how fake they would sound. They wouldn’t be fake; he knew that. But they would sound fake, which meant it would take an effort of will, a deliberate exercise of empathy, to accept them as real. He wasn’t in the mood to hear yet another person say I’m sorry, I didn’t know; much less to respond with the requisite It’s okay; you didn’t know. It would take a strength of conviction he didn’t have right now.
“Y—you don’t have to explain it tonight? I’ll just, I’ll just not use that phrase anymore, and maybe in the morning you’ll be less in the mood to lash out at me for things that don’t make sense.”
And what was there to say to that? It had taken Jon three tries to force out, “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“Good night, Jon.”
“Good night. I still need the light, for.”
“That’s fine. Just turn it off when you come back to bed.”
“You won’t wake him up,” a new voice interjected.
Annabelle. Jon couldn’t see her, but he had learnt by now to recognize that voice, with its insufferable upbeat teasing inflection like every sentence she said was a riddle. He caught a glimpse of movement, then heard the click of her shoes on the floor. She must have poked her head round the doorway at the far end of the table while she spoke, then scuttled off again. At last he got a good look at her, as she put her blonde-and-gray head through the closer door.
“He’s a very heavy sleeper,” she informed them, with a smile and a shrug. “You can shake him all you want; it’s not going to work.”
Martin cleared his throat—trying to catch Jon’s attention, presumably. But Jon feared Annabelle would vanish again if he took his eyes off her. Not that he wanted her here, either, but?—he at least wanted to know which direction she went when she disappeared.
“What are you doing here, Annabelle.”
She shrugged two of her shoulders. “Just offering you some advice.” Then she used the momentum from the shrug to push herself backward, out of the doorway back into the corridor. Before the last of her hands disappeared off to the right, she waved to both of them.
“Well, how about some ‘advice’ about this, then—”
“She’s already gone, Martin.”
“Seriously? God—which way did she go?” Jon pointed; Martin bolted down the hallway after her. “Oi! Annabelle!”
“Shhh!”
“Annabelle! Do you know where Salesa keeps the—”
Jon did his best to follow him, praying all his limbs would go on straight this time. “Don’t!”
“What? Why not?” he heard, from the other side of the wall. Thankfully he could no longer hear Martin’s pounding footsteps. He overtook him in the hallway, just about able to make out his face around the dark swirls in his vision. “She’s as likely to know as Salesa, right?” Martin continued. “And it’s not like she’d lie about it. I mean, what would be the point?”
“I just don’t think we should give her any kind of advantage over us,” Jon snarled. The attempt to keep his voice down made the words come out sounding nastier than he intended.
Martin scoffed. “You don’t think maybe this is a bit more important than your stupid principle about not accepting help from her?”
“Is it?” Jon took hold of Martin’s sleeve, having just now caught up to him. “The new room’s fine. It’s even nicer than the old one, right? We could just stay there.”
“I already told you, Jon. I’m not just gonna leave it like this.”
“’Til Salesa sobers up, I meant.”
“If we have to, yeah, but—? All our stuff’s in that room. The statements’re in there.”
“I just don’t think we should show her that kind of vulnerability,” Jon hissed, shifting from foot to foot in his eagerness either to sit down or go somewhere else. “I don’t want to give Annabelle something she can use over us.”
“How does this make us more vulnerable than we are eating her food?”
“It doesn’t, alright? That doesn’t mean we should add more to the pile!” He watched Martin shrug and open his mouth, but cut him off in advance: “Last time we had this argument you were the one maintaining she was dangerous.”
It was on their first night here—their first awake here, anyway. They’d been heading back to their room, Martin lamenting that he’d not packed anything to sleep in when they left Daisy’s safehouse. “Won’t make much difference to me,” Jon had shrugged at first.
Martin had shaken his head, grimaced at something in his imagination. “I hate sleeping in my pants. It’s just gross. Dunno why anyone would choose to do it.”
“How is it gross?” Jon had laughed. He’d expected to hear some weird thing about its being unsanitary for that much leg to touch sheets that only got washed every two weeks, and to argue back that in that case shouldn’t he sleep in his socks. Disdain for the body seemed damn near universal, and yet manifested so differently in each person whose habits Jon had got to know up close. Georgie had heard that underarm hair helped wick away the smell of sweat—so she let that hair grow out, but shaved the ones on her stomach for fear they’d smell like navel lint. And Daisy, a woman who used to sniff her used-up plasters before throwing them in the bin, would spray cologne in the toilet every time she left it. Jon had enjoyed getting to know which of bodily self-contempt’s myriad forms Martin subscribed to.
But this turned out not to be one of them. Instead Martin explained, “It’s so sweaty. Like sitting on a leather couch in shorts, except the leather’s your other leg? Ugh. I hate waking up slippery.”
“That’s why I put a pillow between mine,” laughed Jon. “Suppose I will miss Trevor’s t-shirt, though. Now that I don’t have to worry about showing up in people’s dreams like that.”
“Oh, god, right—what is it? ‘You don’t have to be faster than the bear’—?”
“‘You just have to be faster than your friends,'” Jon completed, in the most sinister Ceaseless-Watcher voice he could muster. Martin snorted with laughter.
And then they’d opened the door to discover Annabelle had done them a fucking turndown service. Quilt folded back, mints on the pillows, and a pile of old-timey striped pajamas at the foot of the bed. “Huh. Cree…py, but convenient, I guess. Least they’re not black and white, right?” Martin unfolded the green-striped shirt on top, then handed it with its matching trousers to Jon. “These ones must be yours.”
“Mm.” Jon let Martin hand him the pajamas, then tossed them onto the chair in the opposite corner of the room (from which chair they promptly fell to the floor). The mint from his side of the bed he deposited in the bin under the bedside table.
“So who’s our good fairy, d’you think? Salesa, or.”
“Annabelle,” Jon hissed. “Salesa was with us all through dinner.”
Martin nodded and sighed. “Yeah.” He sat down on the bed, still regarding the other set of garments—these ones striped yellow and blue—with a puzzled frown. “God, I’ll look like a clown in these. You sure I won’t give you nightmares about the Unknowing?”
But Jon said nothing, still hoping he could avoid weighing in on Martin’s choice whether or not to accept Annabelle’s… gifts.
“It’s probably Salesa’s stuff, at least. Not Annabelle’s. I mean,” Martin mused with a brave laugh, “he’s got a lot of weird outfits on hand apparently.”
“Unless she wove them out of cobwebs.”
“That’s not a thing,” Martin groaned, making himself laugh too. “Spider webs aren’t strong enough to use as thread.”
“Not natural ones, maybe,” Jon said with a shrug and a careful half smile. With no less care, he turned the sheets and counterpane back up on his side of the bed, restoring the way it’d looked when he and Martin made up the bed that morning. Stacked the frontmost pillow back upright against the one behind it. Punched it a little, more as a way to break the silence than because it looked too fluffy. Then sat down in front of them and put his shoe up on the bedside table so he could untie it—glancing first at Martin to make sure he didn’t disapprove.
“I mean, I guess,” Martin mused meanwhile. “Not sure why she’d bother, though. Maybe it’s”—with a gasp and a smile Jon could hear in his voice—“maybe she’s put poison in the threads, and that’s why yours and mine are different. Mine’s got—I dunno, some kind of self-esteem poison, like, a reverse SSRI, to make me feel like you don’t need me, so when she kidnaps you I won’t try to save you. And yours….”
As Jon pulled off his now-untied shoe one of the bones in his hip jabbed against some bit of soft tissue it wasn’t supposed to touch. He gasped and dropped his shoe. It thudded on the floor.
“You alright?”
“Fine. Some kind of dex drain, probably.”
“Ha.”
After a silence, Martin spoke again: “Are you sure you’re okay staying here for a bit? Sorry—I kinda bulldozed over your objections earlier.”
Jon finished untying his other shoe, then paused to think while he shook the cramp out of his hand. “No,” he decided. “You didn’t bulldoze, you just…questioned. And you were right to.”
“Still, I mean. It might not be a great idea to stick around here with the spider lady who’s had it in for us since day one. Have you re-listened to the tapes from the day Prentiss attacked, by the way, since you got them back from the Not-Sasha thing?”
“Right—the spider, yes.”
“Yeah, exactly! You wouldn’t even have broke through that wall if it hadn’t been for the spider there!”
Jon nodded and scrubbed at his eyes, trying to muster the energy to match Martin’s tone. This was an important conversation to have, he knew. And a part of him shuddered with recognition to hear Martin talk about those tapes. He had re-listened to them—first at Georgie’s, one night in the small hours as he cleaned her kitchen, thinking clearly for the first time in months and trying to pinpoint the exact moment his thoughts had been clouded with paranoia, so that he might know what signs to look for if something else tried to infect his mind like that. And then again after Basira found the jar of ashes. That time he’d just wanted to suck all the marrow he could from the memory of Martin with his sensible corkscrew and his first answer to Why are you here, even if it did mean having to hear himself ask if Martin was a ghost. A few weeks later, however, after Hilltop Road, he’d done a fair bit of obsessing over the spider thing with Prentiss, yeah. He just wished he could remember what conclusion he’d come to.
All he could remember was going for those tapes yet again only to find them missing from his drawer. But he’d been chasing phantoms all day; it was late at night by then, and when he’d dashed out to tell Basira his fear Annabelle had stolen them, stolen his memories from him just like the Not-Them had, he’d stood there over her and Daisy’s frankenbag for what felt like an hour, mouth open, unable to utter a sound. It felt too much like going to wake up his grandmother after a dream. So he’d told himself to sleep on it—that he’d probably left the tapes in some other obvious place, and would find them in the morning. And when he remembered his panic, the next day at lunch, and checked his drawer again, the tapes were back, right where he expected them. He’d dismissed it as a dream after all. But no—Martin must have borrowed them. He must’ve been worried about the Web, too.
“It’s… it should be okay. I don’t think it’ll be like that here.”
Martin sighed. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“That thing where you just—decide how something is without even telling me why you think so. I mean it’s one thing out there, when you ‘know everything’” (this in a false deep voice) “and can’t possibly share it all, but here? When you’re just guessing, like everyone else? Why don’t you think it’ll be like that here? And what does ‘like that’ even mean?”
“I'm sorry—you’re right—I just mean, I don’t think she has her powers here. Based on what Salesa said about the camera, and on what happens when I try to use my powers….”
“Salesa just said the Eye can’t see this place, though. What about that insect thing he said found its way in?”
“I mean.” Jon shrugged. “We managed to find our way here without the Eye’s help.”
“Yeah, but if the Web has no power here then how could she have called me on a payphone? She had to have known where I was to do that, yeah? And she couldn’t know that from here unless the Web told her to do it, right?”
“Maybe? We don’t even know if the Web works like that.”
“Told her to do it, made her want to do it, gave her the tools to do it, whatever. You know what I mean. Look—we know the Eye’s not totally blind here, since it can still feed on statements. Right?”
Jon wondered now how either one of them could have been so sure of that. “Apparently,” he liked to think he had said—but more likely he’d replied simply, “Right.”
“So then by that logic the Web still probably likes it when she—I don’t know, when she manipulates people here. It probably still gets, like, live tweets from her about it. How do we know it can’t use that information to weave more plots around us?”
“If that’s even how it works,” Jon had replied again. “The other fears don’t work like that—they don’t plan, they just.” He tried to sort his intuition into Martin’s live tweet metaphor. “The fears just like their agents’ tweets, they don’t… comment on them, o-or build new opinions on what they’ve read. It boosts the avatar's… popularity, I guess? Their influence?” Jon hadn’t even logged into Twitter since before the Archives. “But unless the Web is different from all the other fears, it doesn’t—it’s not her boss. It doesn’t come up with the schemes, it just.”
“Isn’t it literally called the ‘Spinner of Schemes’, though? The ‘Mother of Puppets’?”
And Jon couldn’t remember what he’d said to brush off that one.
“Of course she’s dangerous,” Martin said now. “I just don’t see what sinister plot of hers we could possibly be enabling by asking her where to find screwdrivers.”
Jon scoffed. “She’s with the Web, Martin! The ‘Mother of Puppets,’ the ‘Spinner of Schemes’? You’re not supposed to be able to see how the threads connect. Anything we ask her gives her another opening to sink her hooks into.”
“So what, you just don’t want to owe her a favor?”
“Yes?” Jon blinked—on purpose, needless to say. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I mean—why do you think she’s here, Martin, ingratiating herself with us?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the one place on Earth that hasn’t been turned into a hell dimension?”
Jon snarled and set his head in his free hand. The dizziness was coming back. “In her statement Annabelle said the trick to manipulating people was to make sure they always either over or underestimate you.”
“Okay,” granted Martin, as though prompting Jon to explain how this was relevant.
“She’s trying to humanize herself,” he maintained, scratching an imaginary itch behind his glasses. “We shouldn’t let her.”
“I mean, she is physically more human here.”
“Is she? She doesn’t seem to be withdrawing from the Web; she’s not—like this.” Jon turned his wrist in a circle next to his head.
“Yeah but she’s been here for months, right? Maybe she’s passed through that stage.”
A bitter huff of laughter. “So you’re saying she’s reformed.”
“No. I’m saying the fact she’s not all—loopy here doesn’t necessarily mean she still has any power.”
“She’s got four arms and six eyes, Martin!”
“And you sleep with your eyes open and summon tape recorders, Jon!”
“Well,” mused Jon with a wry smile, “not on purpose.”
“That’s my point! You’ve only got—vestiges here, yeah? I’m not saying we should trust her; I don’t wanna be friends or anything. I’m just saying I don’t think the actual concrete danger she poses here is what’s making you hate the idea of asking her for directions.”
“What about that insect thing Salesa said she chased off. Does that not sound spidery to you?”
“We don’t know that! Maybe she waved his syringe at it.”
Jon took a deep, shaky breath through his nose. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to bring up this next part; he feared it might make Martin too afraid to stay here any longer. “I think she’s plotting against us.”
Blink. “Well, yeah. Of course she is. She’s been plotting against us for—”
“Here, I mean. I mean, I think that’s why she’s here. She’s been hiding from the Eye on purpose so she could lure us into her trap with her spindly little”—Jon thought of the earrings that dangled from Annabelle’s ears like flies, swinging with her every sudden movement. Unconsciously he struck out with his hand as if to catch one, closing his fist around empty air. “Without my being able to see either her or the trap. At best, she’s here gathering information about us so she can report it back to her master.” He pictured the thousand spiders he’d seen birthed during Francis’s nightmare crawling back and forth with messages between here and the nearest Web domain—
“I thought you said the fears didn’t work that way,” pursued Martin—
“And every little thing we tell her is one more thread she can use to pull on us.”
“Okay, but, even if you’re right, ‘Hey Annabelle, our doorknob’s busted, can you help us find the tools to fix it’ isn’t actually a fact about us.”
“But that’s just the best-case scenario, Martin! The worst-case scenario is that she predicted we’d get locked out of our room, or even loosened the screw herself—”
“Not this again—”
“—because she knew we’d have to ask her for help, and wherever she tells us to look for the screwdriver is where she’s laid her trap! Think about it—this couldn’t happen outside the range of the camera, right? It would only work in a place where I can’t just know where to find something. That’s the only scenario where we’d ever ask her for directions.” Martin sighed, crossed his arms, rolled his eyes. Jon looked right at him, hoping to catch them on their way back down. “What if her plan is to trap us here forever so we can’t go stop Elias? What if by trusting her with this, we give her the tools to keep the world like this forever?”
Again Martin sighed. He bit his lip, at last seeming not to have an argument lined up already.
“I can’t actually stop you from going after her”—Jon heard Martin scoff, but pressed on—“but I can’t take part in this.”
“You sort of already did stop me, Jon.” He lifted his arm, pointing vaguely in the direction she’d gone. “We can’t catch up with her now.”
That wasn’t quite true, Jon knew; Martin had chosen to stop and listen to him. Instead of pointing this out in words Jon smiled, meekly, and reached for Martin’s hand. “Guess that’s true. Are you, er, ready for lunch now?”
His answering scoff sounded fond, indulgent, rather than incredulous. “Yeah, alright.”
With Martin’s hand still in his, Jon turned around—an awkward business, while holding hands in such a narrow passage—and began to walk back towards the dining room. At the end of the corridor stood a tall, thin, many-limbed figure, holding a water carafe, a stack of glasses, and four steaming plates of food.
“You boys getting hungry?” As she stepped toward them her shoes clacked against the floor. How had they not heard her approach? And what was she doing back at that end of the corridor?
“How did you—?”
“I have my ways. I’ve brought lunch for you both, if you’re amenable.”
“Oh—well, thanks, you’re, you’re just in time, actually.” Jon didn’t dare look away from Annabelle Cane long enough to confirm this, but suspected Martin had directed that last bit at him as much as her. “Can I help you with those?”
Annabelle managed to shrug without dislodging anything from the four plates in her hands. “You can take the napkins if you want,” she said, extending toward Martin the forearm from which they hung.
Jon sat back down in the chair he’d left at a haphazard angle—though it felt weird, since he usually sat on the table’s other side. He thanked Martin when he handed him a napkin, and allowed Annabelle to set an empty glass and a plate of food in front of him. It was a pasta dish, with clams—from a can, he reminded himself. A can and a jar of pasta sauce. Couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes to put together.
“Salesa’s still out of it,” observed Martin. “Don’t think he’ll make too much of his.”
“A shame,” Annabelle agreed. She set a plate down in front of the sleeping Salesa anyway. “Maybe the smell of food’ll wake him up.”
“Are you going to eat with us?” Martin asked, as he and Jon both watched her deposit a fourth plate across the table from them.
“I may as well. We do still have to eat to live here, don’t we?” Jon could tell she meant this comment as an invitation for him to join their conversation, but he didn’t intend to take her bait. “Besides,” Annabelle went on, “this way you’ll know I’ve not saved the best for myself.” With one hand she picked up her own plate again; another of her long, thin arms reached out to take Jon’s plate.
He dragged it to the side, out of her reach. “No, thank you.”
“Alright. Martin,” she said, looking over at him with a patient, patronizing smile. “Will you switch plates with me?”
“Oh, my god,” Martin groaned into his hand. “Sure, why not.”
Something small and gray skittered across the table toward her. For half a second Annabelle took her eyes from Martin. Her nostrils flared; one of her eyes twitched; Jon heard a stifled squawk from behind her closed lips as she swept the skittery thing over her edge of the table. He made no such effort to hide his scoff. Did she think she could play nice, by declining to hold little spider conversations in front of them? That they’d think she was on their side as long as they couldn’t see her chatting to her little spies?
“Thank you,” Annabelle sing-songed meanwhile, returning her gaze to Martin. “You’re sweet.”
On their first morning here, after showering and then shuddering back into their filthy clothes, Jon and Martin had barely left their room before Annabelle dangled herself in their path, with cups of tea (Jon refused his) and an offer to show them to the pantry. From this tour Jon had concluded that all food in this place was tainted by her influence. And he didn’t actually feel hungry at that point? He remembered Martin remarking on his hunger before they’d both fallen asleep, but Jon had felt only tired. Surely that meant he still didn’t need food here, right? It’d been like that before the change, after the coma—he’d needed sleep and statements to keep up his strength, but could function just fine without… people food. So he’d resolved to accept nothing offered him here—or at least, nothing Salesa and Annabelle hadn’t already given him and Martin without their consent. No tea, none of Salesa’s booze, no use of the huge industrial washing machines, no food.
That resolution lasted about nine hours. He knew because on that first day time still felt like such a novelty he and Martin had counted every one. Once he’d tried and failed to compel Salesa—once he’d heard him give a statement and managed to space out for half of it, rather than transcending himself in the ecstasy of vicarious fear—Jon started to grow conscious of his hunger. After two hours he felt shaky; after four he started picking quarrels, first just with Annabelle when she showed up with snacks, then with Salesa, and then even with Martin; after six he felt first hot, then cold. Finally around the eight-hour mark he was hiding tears over an untied shoelace, and figured it was worth finding out how much of this torment people food could solve. He sat through dinner, flaunting his empty plate—then stole to the pantry for something he could make himself. Settled for dry toast and raisins. “Couldn’t you find the jam?” Martin had asked him.
“Didn’t think of it,” Jon lied, once he’d got his throat round a lump of under-chewed toast.
“You want me to get some for you? That looks pretty depressing without it,” Martin said, with his eyebrows and the line of his mouth both raised in a pitying smile.
“Better make it one of the sealed jars.”
“What, so Annabelle can’t have got to it?” Jon nodded, chewing so as to have neither to smile back nor decide not to. “You know she made the bread, right.”
Of course she had. Jon dropped his head onto his fists. “Fuck.”
“What did you think?” mused Martin with a laugh. “That Salesa just popped down to the supermarket?”
“I don’t know—that they’d taken it from the freezer, maybe?”
“I mean, that’s possible,” Martin granted with a shrug. “Should I get you that jam?”
Big sigh. “Fine.”
In reality he’d stared up at the row of jam jars in Salesa’s pantry for a full ten seconds before deciding not to have any. He feared spiders would spill out of the jar onto his hand as soon as he got it open. But he also feared he might not be able to open it at all—only hurt himself trying. Way back in their first year in the Archives together, Martin had once seen him struggling to get open the jar where he kept paperclips. Jon hadn’t realized he was being watched—or, that is, that Martin was watching him. In the Archives the sense of someone watching was so omnipresent one soon lost the ability to distinguish Elias’s evil Eye from other, more mundane eyes. Anyway, after three minutes’ effort and nothing to show for it but a misplaced MCP joint in his thumb, Jon had given up on paper-clipping the photos Tim had pilfered for him to their relevant statement and begun hunting through his desk drawers for a stapler instead. And then a high-pitched pop above his head made him startle so badly he gasped, choked on his own spit, and flung the picture in his hand across the room like a paper airplane.
Around the sound of his own cough he could hear Martin shouting Sorry, and Tim and Sasha laughing on the other side of the wall. Martin’s laugh soon joined theirs, though it sounded desperate, sheepish. He dove after the photo Jon had dropped, and then, when he came back with it, explained, “Got the paperclips for you.”
Jon frowned. “This is a photograph, Martin.”
“No, I mean—?” His laugh came out like a whimper; he picked the unlidded jar up an inch off the table, then set it back down. “Here.”
Okay, so, not exactly an auspicious start, but, it still became a thing? Martin opening his paperclip jar. At first he’d wished he could just remember not to seal it so tightly; he could get it just fine when he stopped turning it earlier. At least when the weather hadn’t changed since the last time he opened it. But then when they all started leaving the Archives less often, and the break-room fridge filled up with condiments that all seemed to have twist-off lids… he’d kind of liked that? Martin would hand him the peanut-butter jar, with its lid off and pinned to its side with one finger, before Jon had even finished asking for it. This seemed to be the pattern behind all his early positive impressions of Martin: the jar lids, the corkscrew, the way he managed to make mealtimes at the Institute feel like proper breaks. Martin had seemed like such an oaf to him at first—clumsy, absent-minded, always seeming to think that if he professed enough good will with his smiles and cups of tea and I know you won’t like this, but, then no one would notice his impertinent comments and all the doors he left wide open. All the dogs and worms and spiders he let in. He’d seemed to Jon the human embodiment of a fly left undone—more so than ever after the morning he’d walked in on him wearing naught but frog-print boxer shorts. But he had this easy grace with things that needed twisting off. Banana peels, bottle caps, wine corks, worms.
And then when he came back after the Unknowing Martin was never around. Jon and Basira and Melanie all lived in the Archives, like Martin had two years before, but by that point he wasn’t on Could you open this for me? terms with any of them. But he hadn’t needed people food anymore, and if he subluxed a joint it would heal instantly anyway. So he’d just struggled and sworn, feeling stupid for shrinking from the pain even after having chopped off his own finger. And it got easier with practice. By the time he and Martin reunited, he’d got so used to it that sometimes he’d hand jars to Martin already unlidded. Martin hadn’t seemed to notice. Finally, one evening a day or two after that row they had over the ice-cream thing, Jon had opened a jar of pasta sauce (he’d taken up people food again at Daisy’s safehouse, if only to make their time there feel more like a regular holiday), and reached out to hand it to Martin—then paused and retracted the hand that gripped the jar, remembering his promise to be more open about.
“This is, um.” He’d glanced up at Martin, then back to the floor as the latter said,
“Huh?”
“This is one of those things that’s got better since the coma. Since I became an avatar. I can, um. I can open jars now? Without.” He’d almost said Without hurting myself, then remembered that wasn’t technically true. Deep breath. “Without lasting harm. It—it hurts for a second? But the Eye heals it instantly. That's why I’ve been.”
“Oh,” Martin said, seeming to stall for time as he absorbed this information. He accepted the jar which Jon again held out to him, and turned it around in his hands, eyes on its label. “Yeah, I—I noticed, you’re really good at opening jars now,” he went on with a laugh. Again he paused, and blew a sigh out of his mouth. “Right. Okay. Thank you for telling me?”
“I’ll try and be better about….”
Martin nodded, turning back to the stove and beginning to stir sauce into the pasta. “Yeah. I, uh—I didn’t know that was why you used to need me to open them for you?” Since the other night’s argument, Jon had gathered as much. He nodded too. “I thought you were just, heh, you know. Weaker than me.”
“I mean, I am—”
“Well yeah but you know what I mean.”
“I do. I should’ve told you.”
“No, I—actually I think you’re in the clear on that one, if I’m honest. I just—it’s just weird? I thought I was done having to” (another blown-out sigh punctuated his speech) “having to reframe stuff I thought was normal around some unseen horror. Sorry,” he added when he’d finished beating sauce off Daisy’s wooden spoon; “that’s probably not a great way to.”
“No—it’s fine?”
“Suppose it sounds like an exaggeration, now, after all we’ve.”
Mechanically, Jon nodded, without deciding whether he agreed or not. Around an awkward laugh, he confessed, “‘Unseen horror’ might be the nicest way I’ve ever heard anyone describe it.”
“Er. Yikes? That sounds like you might need some better friends, Jon.”
“Maybe,” he conceded, laughing again. “I—I just mean, it’s nice to hear something other than?” Jon paused and pushed his little fingers back the hundred or so degrees they each would go. First the left, then the right. Other than what? Well, doubt, for a start. Though most of the doubt he heard from outside himself was implicit. Careful silence from people he told about it; requests people made of him seemingly just so he’d have to tell them he couldn’t do that; impatience, bafflement, suspicion from strangers. Why are you out of breath, the woman behind the Immigration desk had asked him at O’Hare, as if breathlessness incriminated him somehow. But that wasn’t the response he’d subconsciously measured Martin’s phrase against. What he had in mind now was more like… bland support. Hurried support. Assurances quick and dutiful, yet so vague he could tell the people who gave them were thinking only of the mistakes they might make, if they dared to acknowledge what he’d said with any more than half a sentence. The I’m sorry you’re in pain equivalents of Right away, Mr. Sims.
That was it—unseen horror was an original thought. Martin had put it in his own words, rather than either borrowing Jon’s or using none at all. “Other than a platitude.”
So at Salesa’s when Martin came back with the jam jar he handed it to Jon. Jon made a show of trying to open it, but could feel his middle finger threatening to leave its top half behind. It frightened him, in a way he’d forgot was even possible. For such a long time now, pain had just been pain? He’d grown so unused to the threat it held for normal people. The threat of actual danger, of injury. He’d set down the jar on the table in front of him, and crossed his arms in front of it.
“Can’t get it, huh?” Martin asked; Jon shook his head.
How much danger, though, he wondered. Earlier that day, after he and Martin got out of the bath, his left index finger had popped out while he was buttoning his shirt. It still ached when he used the finger, or thought about the cracking sound it had made—but didn’t throb anymore without provocation. Not much danger there; not even much inconvenience. He supposed if he hurt his middle finger too then he might have some trouble with his trouser button the next time he had to pee? Right, yes, what a cross to bear. I hurt myself doing x; now it hurts to do x. But it already hurt to do x, didn’t it? Didn’t x always hurt, before the change? Why did he so fear to face an hour or a day where it hurt more than usual, but not so much I can’t do it?
“So you’re saying it won’t… come off?”
“Ha, ha.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”
“What if I open it and it’s full of spiders?”
Martin had smiled, rolled his eyes, pulled the jar toward him, and twisted its lid off with a pop. “See? No spiders in this one.
“While you’re here, Annabelle,” Jon heard Martin say, “I don’t suppose you know anything about where Salesa keeps his screwdrivers?”
Annabelle tapped her chin and said, very pleasantly, “Hmmm. Perhaps they’re where he left them after the last time something broke.”
Martin’s lips drew closer together. “Yeah,” he nodded, “probably. Any idea where that might be?”
“Perhaps he keeps them next to whatever screw comes loose most often.”
“And do you know which screw that is?”
She shook her head, though who knew whether that meant she didn’t know or merely that she didn’t mean to tell him. “Perhaps he only uses the item when he’s alone,” she said, with a shrug and a sly smile.
“…Ew.” Annabelle cackled like a school kid pulling a prank. “Right, great,” sighed Martin. “Thanks a lot. Forget it. You done, Jon?”
Jon glanced sleepily down at his plate. Only half empty, but cold by now. “Yes.”
“Nice of you to grace us with your presence, Annabelle,” Martin said, sliding his and Jon’s plates toward her side of the table.
Instead of energy, lunch gave Jon only a slight queasy feeling—like one gets from eating sweets on an empty stomach.
“God”—hissed Martin, with clenched fists, as they ambled back to their room—“‘Perhaps he keeps them next to the screw that gets loose most often.’ Yeah, figured that out already, thanks! Can you even believe her? Sitting down to eat with us, as if she’s all ready to help, and then the best she can do is,” he paused and straightened, then said with a finger to his chin in imitation of Annabelle, “‘Oh, hm, guess he only uses it alone. Oh well!’”
“Don’t know what else you expected.”
Martin sighed, his arms crossed now. “Guess I should’ve done what you asked after all, since that accomplished nothing.” After a moment he went on, “Least it wasn’t a trap, right? I tried not to give her anything she could use against us.” With a smile Jon could hear without looking at him, “You notice how I pointedly didn’t offer to help clean up?”
“No, I didn’t,” Jon confessed, laughing a little.
“No?!” Again Martin paused on his feet, frowning, incredulous. Jon wished he wouldn’t; standing still made him dizzier, took more effort than walking, like that poor woman in Oliver’s domain. Daniela? Martin shook his head at himself. “Ugh—then who knows if she noticed, either. I thought I was being so obvious!”
“I mean—”
“Wait, hold up, let’s double back.”
“Are you going to go back and tell her it was on purpose?”
“No, just”—he echoed Jon’s laugh—“no, of course not. I just wanted to try that wing’s toilets next. Didn’t want her to see which way we were going.”
“Oh.” By this time Martin had turned around and started to walk the other way; Jon hung back. “Er. I thought—I thought we were going to our room first.”
“What, the new one you mean?” asked Martin, turning his head around to look back at him.
“…Yes,” Jon decided. Until this moment he’d forgot about that, and been daydreaming of their original bed.
“Sure, if you want. Do you need a break?”
“I… I think so, yes.”
Martin turned the rest of the way around, shuffled toward Jon and looked him over, with a concerned frown. He took his free hand between his fingers and thumb, brushing the latter over Jon’s knuckles. “Yeah, okay. You still seem pretty out of it. How are you feeling?”
“Not great,” answered Jon, though he smiled in relief at Martin’s willingness to change the plan for him.
“Food didn’t help?”
His stomach seemed hung with cobwebs; his mind, like a large room with half its lights burnt out. His light head seemed attached to his heavy, aching body only by a string, like a balloon tied to an Open-House sign. He still needed the toilet. “Not really?”
“Yeah, thought not. You need a statement, huh.”
Jon shrugged, avoiding Martin’s eyes. “Probably.”
In the interim bedroom Jon sat down at the edge of the bed, bent down over his legs, and untied his shoes, wondering why his life always came back around to this. His hip got stuck like a drawer that’s been pulled out crooked, so he had to lever himself back up with his arms, trapping fistfuls of counterpane between thumbs and the meat of his palms. It made his hands cramp, but that helped—the way it would have helped to bite his finger. When he’d got himself upright again he sat and blinked for a few seconds, hoping each time he opened his eyes that his vision would’ve cleared.
Martin sat down next to him and put his hand on Jon’s arm. “You’re blinking again. You okay?”
“Just… kind of dizzy? It’s an Eye thing.”
He let Martin pull him towards him until their shoulders touched. “Yeah. Makes sense. Nap should help. Statement’ll definitely help.”
“Right.”
They agreed to lie on the bed rather than properly in it, not wanting to have to put the covers back together afterward. Jon set his head on that squishy part of Martin’s chest where it started to give way to armpit, knowing to angle himself so the scar tissue pressed the hollow part of his cheek rather than anywhere bonier. It was normally dangerous to lie half on his back, half on his side like this, but he’d lately discovered he could use Martin’s leg to keep his hip from falling off. He could feel the muscles in his shoulder twitching and cramping, whether to pull the joint out or keep it in who could tell. But it’d be fine as long as he shrugged the arm every few minutes.
All the ways they knew to spend time in each other’s company had come together in Scotland, where he’d had none of these worries. Even after the change, on their journey, with nothing but sleeping bags between them and desecrated earth, he’d borne only the same aches he’d been ignoring since he read the statement that ended the world. Jon imagined lying next to Martin like this on the cold stone of a tomb in the Necropolis, surrounded by guardian angels’ malicious laughter. Not feeling the cold, or the grain of the stone against his ankles and the bandage on his shin—just knowing it was there, like when you watch someone suffer those things in a movie. Less vivid even than a statement about lying on a tomb; in Naomi Herne’s nightmare he’d felt the stone in her hands.
“Hfff, okay—ready to get back to it?”
“Mrrr.”
“…Jon, are you asleep?”
He shrugged his hanging shoulder. “No.”
Nose laugh. “Come on, wake up.”
“Mmrrrrrrr.”
“My arm’s asleep.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It won’t wake up ‘till you get up off of it, Jon,” said Martin, gently, between huffs of laughter.
“Hmr.” Jon rolled away to face the wall with the window, freeing Martin’s arm.
“Do you want me to go look without you?”
“Okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mhm.”
Cold air washed over his newly-exposed arm, ribcage, side of face, the outside of his sore hip. It was cold on this Martinless side of the bed, too. He rolled back over into the shadow of his warmth, but that still wasn’t as good as the real thing. Maybe he could pull the covers halfway out and roll himself up in them.
“Aaagh, no—Jon”—Martin’s cool hand on top of his as he tried to hook his fingers round the counterpane— “we’re trying to leave the room the way we found it, remember?”
“Hmmmrrgh.” He consented to leave his hand still when Martin’s departed from it. A few seconds later, a rustle against his ear, the smell of smoke and old clothes.
“Here.”
Jon crunched the jacket down so it wouldn’t itch his ear. “You won’t need it?”
“Probably not.”
“Hm.”
“I’ll be back for it if I have to go outside again, yeah?”
“Okay.”
In his mind’s eye they trudged into the wind, hand in hand. It blew Martin’s hood off his head, and inverted Jon’s cane like an umbrella. He shrunk himself further under Martin’s jacket, relishing the new pockets of warmth he created as his calves met his thighs and his hands gripped his shoulders.
“Ooookay…! Wish me luck?”
“Good luck,” managed Jon around a yawn.
Martin had been right about the wallpaper. Not only was the red too bright to look at comfortably; it also had the kind of flowered pattern just complex enough that every time you look back at it you’re compelled to double-check where it repeats. Every fourth stripe was the same as the first, right? Not every second? And that weird little scroll-shaped petal—he’d seen that one too recently. Was it the same as?—No, that one was a bud. He pulled Martin’s jacket up so it covered his eyes.
They’d put their jackets through the laundry with everything else, their first day here, but that hadn’t got the smell out. Enough time had passed between the burning building and their arrival here for the smoke to embed itself permanently into their jackets and shoes, like how duffel bags once taken camping always smell like barbecue. And everything they’d ever shoved in those backpacks still had some of that odd, sour, Ritz-cracker smell of clothes left unwashed too long.
Daisy used to smell like smoke and laundry, too, once she quit smelling like dirt. It was the smell of the old green sleeping bag she’d zipped up to Basira’s. She said she’d have showered it off if she could; she didn’t like it. To her it was a Hunt smell—it reminded her of her clearing in the woods. But there weren’t any showers in the Archives. She’d point this out every time, in the same wry voice, so Jon was sure she’d intended the metaphor. No showers in the Archives: you couldn’t hide your sins in a temple of the Eye. This had comforted Jon—or maybe flattered was the word, though he knew her better than to think she’d have done so on purpose. He just wasn’t sure he agreed. He’d hid his sins pretty well from himself, after the coma. It was easy; you just had to lose track of scale. No one could remember all of them at once, after all. Others had had to point the important ones out to him.
Were those footsteps he could hear out there? Not Annabelle’s—? No; her clicky shoes. These were blunter. Could be Salesa, awake at last, come to invite them to play a game with him. “How do you two feel about… foosball?” he would say, drawing out the last word in a husky whisper. Only then would he swing the door wide open to reveal himself in a shiny jersey, shorts, and studded shoes. He set his fists out before him and turned them in semicircles, pretending to manipulate the plastic rods of a foosball table. Jon curled still more tightly into himself at the thought of Salesa’s face, how his showman’s grin would crumple like a hole in a cellophane wrapper when he realized the fun one had gone and that he faced only the Archivist. “Oh—hello. Jon, is it? Where has your lovely Martin gone?”
“Oh, uh. Martin needs a screwdriver to fix our door, so I.”
He watched Martin march his silent way slowly, solemnly down a corridor that grew darker, grayer, vaguer with every step until the webs that lined its every side and hung in laces from the ceiling began to catch on his shoes, his belt, his glasses.
“I let him go off alone.”
Jon’s whole body flinched. He gasped awake—oh shit. How had he just let Martin go? He had to—couldn’t stay here—find Martin—keep him out of Annabelle’s clutches—
Stick-thin bristling spider legs tapped the floor of his mind like fingers on a table. Find Martin. Jon instructed himself to sit up, swing his legs over the side of the bed and reach down to grab his shoes. He twitched one finger. See? You can do this. In a minute he’d try again and be able to move his whole arm, push himself up onto one hand. Find Martin.
Also probably go to the toilet. With an empty bladder his head would be clearer, he could figure out which direction to look first.
After Hopworth, while he laid on the couch in his office waiting for the strength to throw himself into the Buried, Jon had imagined Martin and Georgie and Basira and Melanie all stood around that coffin, wearing black and holding flowers. Denise? No, it definitely had three syllables. A scattered applause began as Jonah Magnus emerged from his office, closed behind him the door printed with poor dead Bouchard’s name, and stepped up to the podium. Georgie, not knowing his face, began to clap; Melanie stayed her hands. Elagnus’s shirt, hidden behind suit except for the collar, was striped in black and white. A ball and chain hung from his sleeve like an enormous cufflink. He opened his mouth to speak, and a tape recorder began to hiss.
“What are you doing here?” asked Basira.
“Never underestimate how much I care for the tools I use, Detective. I wouldn’t miss my Archivist’s big day.”
“So they just let you out for this.”
Elias shrugged with false modesty. His chain jingled. “When I asked them nicely.”
“How did you even know he was dead?” interposed Melanie. “Basira, did you tell him about the—”
“She didn’t have to,” said Elias, raising his voice to cut Melanie’s off. “Nothing escapes my notice, and I like to keep an eye out for this sort of thing.”
“Well—it’s—good to see you.” Tim’s voice. Unconvincing, even then.
Jon steeled himself to hear his own voice stammer out, “Yes—y-yes!” but heard nothing except the hissing of the… tape. Yes, that was the wrong tape—the one from his birthday.
“Anyway. Somebody mentioned cake.” Elias jingled as he arranged his hands under his chin.
Tim scoffed. “They didn’t serve cake at my funeral.”
“I preferred going out for ice cream anyway,” pronounced Martin, his arms crossed and his nose in the air. Jon pushed himself up on shaking hands. Find Martin.
They had gone for ice cream at John O’Groats before the change, while living at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin had apologized on behalf of the kiosk for its measly selection—no rum and raisin. Jon pronounced a playful “Urgh,” assuming Martin had cited this flavor as a joke. “I think I’ll manage without that particular abomination.”
“Wait, what? Why did you order it at my birthday party then?”
Jon stood still with his ice cream cone, squinted into space, and blinked. “I did?”
“My first birthday in the Archives, yeah!”
“Huh. That’s… odd.” Martin placed a gentle hand on Jon’s back to remind him to resume walking. “I suppose I must have been—huh. Yes,” he mused, nodding slowly as his hypothesis came into focus between his eyes and the ground. “I must still have thought I was tired of all the good flavors at that point.”
He heard Martin scoff a few steps ahead of him. “What, and now you’re happy with plain old vanilla?” Then he heard arrhythmic footsteps thumping toward him from Martin’s direction; he looked up to find Martin reaching his napkin-draped free hand out toward Jon’s ice cream cone. “You’re dripping again,” he explained.
Jon mumbled thanks and shrugged a laugh. “I-I’ve, uh. Come back around on most of them.”
“Except rum and raisin?”
“No—I’ve come around on it, too, just, uh.” He tried to make the shape of a wheel with his ice-cream-cone-laden hand. It flicked drips of vanilla across his shirt. Martin came at him with the napkin again. “Thank you. I just disliked that one to start with.”
“…Right. Okay, so what revolution occurred in your life before the Archives that overturned all your opinions on ice cream flavors?”
So Jon had told Martin about that summer when his jaw kept subluxing. He’d used that word, assuming Martin was familiar with it already—incorrect, as he knew now. Presumably Martin had gathered from context that Jon meant he’d hurt his jaw, in some small-scale, no-big-deal way whose specifics he’d let slide as an unimportant detail. But then as the anecdote wore on he must have begun to feel the hole in his knowledge. And lo, at last Martin had invoked that dread specter the clarifying question.
“Okay but so your grandmother had no problem with you basically living off ice cream all summer?”
“Well, she did when I could chew. But not when it was that or tinned soup.”
“Ah—right. ‘Cause you hurt your… jaw, you said?” Jon nodded. “What happened exactly?”
“Oh. Uh. Happened? Nothing, just my—I was born, I guess. Just part of my genetic condition; I happened to get it especially bad in the jaw that year. I-it’s much better now, though,” he hastened to add when he noticed Martin’s frown.
“What genetic condition? You never told me you had one.”
“Didn’t I?”
At the time, the anger in Martin’s answering scoff had surprised him. “No, Jon, you never said.”
“Oh. Sorry? I—I mean, you’ve seen me with this for years—I just?—thought you knew.”
“Seen you with—what, the cane, you mean? I thought that was Prentiss!”
Jon glanced to the doorway to double-check that was where he’d left his cane.
“What? No,” he had mused. “Of course not. I’ve had this since….”
“But you never used it.”
“No—surely, I—”
“Not once before Prentiss.”
Even as he’d said the words, Jon’s memory of that time had returned to him and he’d known Martin was right. Before Prentiss attacked the Institute he’d brought his cane with him to work in the Archives every day, and every day left it folded up in his bag. All out of an obscure notion that if he’d used it before Elias and before his coworkers, they’d take it as a plea for mercy, an admission of weakness or incompetence. God, he was naïve back then. He’d used the cane often enough back in Research; why hadn’t he worried Tim and Sasha would find its new absence conspicuous? That they’d worry just as much about his refusal to use it? The whole thing seemed even more stupid, too, now that he knew Elias must have noticed the change. How it must have pleased him, to see his shiny new Archivist so obsessed with proving he was fit for the job.
“Yeah but,” Jon pursued, instead of voicing any of this, “Tim never—?”
Martin nodded and shrugged. “I don’t know; I figured Tim didn’t get them in the legs as much as you did. I didn’t see you guys after the attack, remember? Not ‘til you got out of quarantine.”
“Right, no, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry,” said Jon mechanically, already consumed with the question he asked next. “Martin—did you think it was the corkscrew?”
From Martin’s sigh Jon figured he’d been expecting this question. “Kinda? At first, yeah. Half for real, half just—you know, as a habit? Like, ‘Look, a way to blame yourself!’” He splayed out his hands, rolled his eyes.
“Yes—I do that too.” Jon barely got the words out above a whisper; he couldn’t not smile, but fought to keep it from showing teeth. A muscle under his chin spasmed with the effort.
“But then I noticed you switching sides with it a lot, so, yeah. I knew it couldn’t be just that.”
“Really?” He waited for Martin’s answering shrug. “You’re the first person who’s ever noticed that. Or at least commented on it.”
“Sorry?”
“No—it’s.”
This attempt to communicate a similar sentiment, Jon recalled as he reached for his shoes, hadn’t gone as well as the one a few days later (over unseen horror &c.). Beholding had at that moment presented him with the image of a fat, hunched woman in shorts. She shuffled forward a few steps in a queue at Boots, next to him, and shifted her weight so the cane in her right hand supported her nearer leg. He felt a strong impulse he knew wasn’t his own—one born partly of resentment, part exasperation, part concern—to tell the woman that was bad for her shoulder, that she should switch hands too. But knew if he tried she’d either pretend she hadn’t heard it, or tell him off for criticizing her. Jon didn’t know what she would say more specifically; the Eye didn’t do hypotheticals. It had given him no more than this single moment of preverbal intuition. After the change he could have sought out other conversations Martin had had with his mother, and they might have given him a pretty good idea. But he’d promised Martin not to look at things like that.
He managed to dislodge a finger while tying his shoe. The other shoe he’d pulled off without untying; in a fit of impatience he tried now to shove his foot into it as it was. No good—he got the shoe on, but it just made the other index finger, the one he’d hooked into the back of the shoe behind his heel for leverage, pop off to the side too. Jon was afraid to find out what shape it would end up in if he pulled his finger back out of the shoe like that, so he had to untie it after all, one-handed. Then carefully extract his finger. It sprung back into place as soon as he removed the offending pressure (namely, his heel), but he still whimpered and swore. The corners of his eyes pricked with indignation when he remembered he still had to pee.
In this case, for once, Beholding had told him the important part: that that was why Martin had noticed. Had he noticed Melanie, too, Jon wondered, when she got back from India? She would switch hands sometimes, too—but, of course, without switching legs. He wondered if that had picked at the same unacknowledged nerve of Martin’s that his mother’s habit had. It had bothered Jon, too, but in a different way. He’d resented it a little, but also felt humbled by it, the way he always did by others’ discomfort. Getting shot in the leg seemed so big? Like such an aberration. So uncontroversially important—probably because it was simple, legible. Georgie could convey its hugeness to him in three words. She got shot. Obviously there was more to the story than that; there were parts he could never…
Well, no. There was a part of it he felt he should say he could never understand: that she’d kept the cursed bullet because she wanted it. In fact he was pretty sure he did understand that. But he didn’t have the right to admit it, he didn’t think. And no reason to hope she would believe him if he did. The second he’d learnt the bullet was still in there, after all, he and Basira had rushed to dig it out. Surely, from her perspective that could only mean he didn’t and could never understand. Or maybe he just wanted her to see it that way—wanted her to get to keep that uncomplicated resentment of his ignorance. It made his perspective look stupid and ugly, sure. But the truth made it look self-absorbed and pitiful. The truth was that until Daisy insisted otherwise, he’d assumed only he could see his own corruption and assent to it: that the others must not have known what they were doing.
Then again, maybe even if Melanie knew that, she would see only that he had underestimated her. Maybe it didn’t matter how much she knew.
Melanie switched off which hand she held her white cane with now, too. But that was probably healthy? Jon knew no more than the average person about white-cane hygiene. He just remembered feeling the floor drop out of his stomach when they’d got coffee together during his time in hiding and he had seen her switch her original, silver cane from hand to hand. Part of him had wanted to scoff or rationalize it away. How much could the shot leg hurt, really, if she still noticed when her arms got tired? But another part of him shuddered at the thought one arm alone couldn’t compensate for the weight her leg refused to take—that she had to keep switching off when one arm got weak and shaky from supporting more weight than it should have to. It wasn’t that he hadn’t experienced pain or impairment on that scale. He had, though the thought of a single injury sufficing to cause it still made him feel cold inside. It was that he kept seeing proofs, all over, everywhere, that the parts of his life he’d only learnt to accept by assuming they were rare weren’t rare.
Leitner hadn’t made the evil books; he’d just noticed they were there. And then had his life ruined by their influence, like everyone who came across them. Jon had had no time and no right to deplore the holes Prentiss had left in him and Tim, because on the same damn day he learnt someone had shot the previous Archivist to death. Alright, so it was him, then, right? Him and Tim—just doomed, just preternaturally unlucky. Tim, handsome face half-eaten by worms, estranged (as Jon then assumed) from a brother who seemed so warm and accepting in that picture on his lock screen; Jon, saved from Mr. Spider only by his childhood bully, now fated to take the place of another murder victim—and also half-eaten by worms. But no; he and Tim had got off lightly. Look what had happened to Sasha the same fucking night. The very thing whose influence convinced him the world had it out for him? Had killed Sasha. Literally stolen her life. How many lives around him got stolen while he mourned his own?
“I want you to comment on it,” Jon had managed to clarify. But Martin had scoffed as he stood in the foyer of Daisy’s safehouse, hopping on one foot to pull off the other shoe:
“Yeah, well. You haven’t exactly led by example on that one.”
“How could I?”
He accepted Jon’s scarf and long-discarded jacket, hanging them up beside his own. “Gee, I don’t know—commenting on it yourself?”
“On… switching which side I used the cane on.”
“Don’t play dumb, Jon. On this ‘genetic condition’” (in a deep, posh voice, with a stodgy frown and fluttering eyelashes) “you’ve apparently had this entire time. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“I thought you knew, Martin! Why would I mention it in a childhood anecdote if I didn’t think...?”
“Well I didn’t know, okay? You never told me. You never tell anyone anything about what’s going on with you, you just—you just make everything into another heroic cross to bear.”
“That’s not—?” He wanted to tell Martin just how little that made him want to say about it. But he guessed Martin was really talking less about the EDS thing, more about how he’d spent their whole first year in the Archives pretending to dismiss the statements that scared him. How he’d sent Tim and Martin home when he’d found out about Sasha. How he’d stayed away from the Institute even after his name got cleared for Leitner’s murder. “What do you want to know.”
“Why you never—?” In a similar way, Martin seemed to reconsider his initial response. “Yeah, okay, right. Object-level stuff, yeah?” Jon nodded and wanly smiled. “Okay, so. What’s it called?”
After taking a minute to ditch his shoes, wash the sticky ice-cream residue off his hands, and drink some water, he’d sat down on the couch with Martin and told him its name, what it was, what it did. What does that mean, though, Martin kept asking, so he’d explained how it applied to the anecdote about his jaw. Martin asked why it meant he needed a cane.
“Be…cause all my joints are like that.”
“Yeah, but why does it help with that? What is the cane actually for, is what I’m asking.”
Jon hated being asked that question. “It—it means I don’t fall over when one of my joints stops working? A-and… also makes walking hurt less. I suppose.”
“So, when they’re working right, that’s when you don’t need it?”
“No—yes?—sort of. Now sometimes I just need it when it’s been too long since I had a statement. I get sort of. Weak.” Quickly Jon added, “But I don’t need it for stability so much since the coma.” He’d shown Martin how now, when he pulled out his finger, the Eye would just sort of erase that version of reality—how the dislocation wouldn’t snap back, but simply cease to exist. As if his body were a drawing on which the Beholding had corrected a mistake. He put his palms together behind his back, in the way he’d been told one couldn’t without subluxing both shoulders, and told Martin to watch how the hollows between his shoulder bones vanished. He opened his jaw ‘til it jarred to the side, and told Martin to listen for the static.
But Jon had never shown Martin how these things worked before the coma. Martin had no reference for this kind of thing; he understood only enough to find the sights unsettling. “That’s—no, that’s okay, I’ll”—he stuttered as Jon fumbled with his kneecap in search of a fourth example—“I-I get it. I’ll take your word for it.”
“I just thought.”
“No, I—? I don’t need you to prove it to me, Jon.” (The latter nodded, blushing, trying to smile.) “I get… I’m sorry. I guess I get why it’d feel easier not to say anything if? If you think it’s either that or have to convince people it’s a thing.”
Again Jon nodded. He suspected Martin wasn’t through talking yet. But Martin still wasn’t looking at him, eyes squeezed tight against Jon’s party tricks. So, to show he was listening, Jon said, “Yes. Er—thank you, Martin.”
“I just don’t like it when you hide things from me.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You could at least ask if I want to know about them, yeah?”
Even at the time, Jon had doubted this. If they’d had this conversation after the change, he might have pointed out to Martin that when you mention something the other person has no inkling of, you make them too curious to decline your offer of more information, even if afterward they’ll admit they wish you’d never told them.
“Or ask me if I even recognize what you’re talking about, the next time you start going on about some childhood anecdote where you incidentally had a dislocated jaw. Honestly, would it kill you to start with, ‘Hey, did I ever tell you about x’?”
“No, it wouldn’t. You’re right. I’ll try. What… kinds of things did you—? For the future, I mean. What kinds of things did you want to make sure I tell you about.”
Martin sighed, in that way he did when he thought Jon was going about something all wrong. But after a pause to think, he did ask, “About this, or in general?”
“Either—both—first one, then the other.”
“Okay. I guess… I want to know when you’re hurt, mostly. Like—I can’t believe I even have to say this—that’s kind of important, actually? How am I supposed to know how to behave around you if I never know whether you're secretly in pain or not?”
This seemed weird—both now and at the time. Jon figured he must be missing something. If Martin thought he only needed the cane because of Prentiss then, sure, that might have affected how he imagined Jon’s discomfort to himself, but? Wasn’t the cane itself an admission of pain? Why did Martin think he owed him more than that—that he had owed him more than that at the time, no less? Did he not realize how fucking private that was? What a surrender of privacy the cane represented?
But, no, he reminded himself now; nondisabled people don’t realize that, unless you tell them about it. Repeatedly. Over and over. It only seems obvious to you because you lived it already.
“Er.” At the time he’d just shown Martin his teeth, with the points of his left-side canines joined. Nominally a smile, but more like a show of hiding the grimace beneath than an actual attempt to hide it. “That’s harder than you might think? Technically I’m always….”
“Oh.”
“Sorr—”
“—What do you mean, ‘technically’?”
“I’m—not always aware of it?” He disliked that phrase, in pain—how it implied a discrete and exclusive state. One could not be in Paris and at the same time in London; similarly, most people seemed to assume one could not be in pain and also in a good mood. In raptures. In a transport of laughter. That when one admits to being in pain, one implies that’s the most important thing they’re conscious of.
“Well that doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes, I know—‘if a tree falls down in a forest’—blah blah blah.” With a gentle smile to acknowledge he’d picked up this mode of speech from Martin. He turned his wrist in circles so it clicked like an old film reel. “Philosophically speaking, if you’re not aware of pain, you can’t be in it. Maybe ‘technically’ isn’t the right word.”
“Oh yeah ‘cause that’s the angle I want to know about this from.”
Jon sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. I just mean, it doesn’t always matter to me.”
“Well it matters to me,” Martin scoffed.
“Yeah—I’m getting that. Is there any way I can explain this that you won’t jump down my throat for?”
Martin sighed, groaned, pulled at his hair a little but made himself stop. (He doesn’t pull it out, Jon knows—he just likes having something to grab onto during awkward conversations. Usually emerges from them looking like a cartoon scientist.) “Okay, yeah,” said Martin. “I get it. I’m sorry too.”
“I mean—when you get a paper cut, that hurts, technically, right?”
“Well yeah, a little, but that’s not the kind of—”
“But just because you notice that hurt doesn’t mean?” He paused to rearrange his words. “You’re not going to remember it later unless someone asks why you’ve got blood on your sleeve.”
“Y—eah. Sure.”
“Is that…?”
“When you’re suffering, then. I want you to tell me that. And—whenever something weird happens? Like, before it stops being weird and you talk to me like I’m stupid for not already knowing about it.”
“What if”—this far into his question, Jon worried it might come off as a smart-alecky, devil’s-advocate thing. So he paused, pretending he needed time to formulate its words. “What if I haven’t decided yet whether it’s weird or not.”
“That in itself is pretty weird, Jon.”
“Fair enough.”
“I want to be part of that conversation. I want you to trust me enough to bounce ideas off me! It’s not like—? I mean why wouldn’t you do that?”
Jon had shrugged and grimaced, hands in his trouser pockets. “Not to worry you?” he’d suggested. But as he bit his lip and shimmied down from the bed Jon knew now that that was the sanitized version—and probably, if you’d asked him a day before or afterward, his past self would have known that too. Most things you told Martin, he’d either ignore them completely or latch onto them, refuse to let them go, and interpret everything else you said in the light they cast. Jon had learnt not to raise any given topic with him until he was sure he wanted to risk its becoming a long, painful discussion. This was part of why he hadn’t kept his promise, he told himself as he turned their interim bedroom’s doorknob. Why he’d said so little about anything weird that had happened to him at Upton House.
“Martin?”
“Oh hey, Jon—you’re awake.” Martin glanced in his vague direction but stayed bent over his work, so Jon could not meet his eyes.
“You found the screwdriver.”
“Yeah! And a screw that matches better, see?” He fished the first one they'd found out of his pocket and held it up next to the door for comparison. Jon supposed they looked a little different—bright yellowy gold vs. a darker gold. “They were in the library, of all places. There’s a little box full of ‘em that he keeps right next to his reading glasses, apparently. Guess he must break them a lot. How are yours, by the way? Any bits feel loose?”
Dutifully, trying to keep his dazed smile to himself, Jon pulled off his glasses. Folded and unfolded each arm, jiggled the little nose pieces. He shook his head. “Don’t think so. You can have a look yourself though, if you like.”
“Remind me later. Should’ve brought the whole box, probably,” Martin said, voice strained as he twisted the screw that last little bit. “There!” His open mouth broadened into a smile. “Time to see if it worked. You wanna do the honors?”
Jon shook his head, breathed a laugh through his nose. “You should do it. You’re the reason it’s fixed.”
“I mean, yeah,” shrugged Martin as his hand closed round the doorknob, “but I’m also the reason it broke.” It opened with a click. “Ha-ha! Success! Statements—our own clothes—our own bed! Er. Ish.”
Something tugged in Jon’s chest; he’d forgot the statements were why Martin thought this quest so urgent. He lingered at the side of the bed while Martin rummaged in his backpack, remembering for once to toe his first shoe off while standing.
“Man. Looks sorta underwhelming now, after the other room, huh?”
“Least our wallpaper’s better.”
“Tsshhyeah, and our view.”
Jon didn’t turn around, but surmised Martin must be looking out at that tree he liked. “Is it four already?”
“Uhh—nearly, yeah. You were out for a while; took me ages to find that damn thing. Here you go,” announced Martin as he slapped a zip-loc bag full of statement down on the bed.
(“So they won’t get water damage,” he had answered a few days ago, when Jon asked him why he’d individually wrapped each statement like snacks in a bagged lunch. “What? It’s not like we have to worry about landfills anymore. If I put them all in the same bag, you’d take one out and not be able to get it back in.”)
“What happened to my jacket, by the way? And yours?”
“Uhhh.”
“Right, okay,” Martin laughed; “I’ll go get them before I forget. I’ll put this away too, I guess” (meaning the screwdriver still in his hand). “Don’t wait for me, yeah? I don’t mind missing the trailers.”
Jon smiled. “Sure.”
As Martin hurried off, Jon sat down to untie and pull off his other shoe, threaded the lace back through the final eyelet from which it’d come loose, picked up the first shoe and untied that one, then stood up and set them by the door next to his cane. Both hips and all ten fingers behaved themselves throughout. As he walked by the vanity he grabbed the coins he’d removed to do laundry the other day and stuck them back in his trouser pocket. Useless, of course, but he’d missed having something to fidget with. He squatted down and peered under the vanity for the hair tie he’d dropped, for the fifth or sixth time since he’d misplaced it. Didn’t find it. That was fine; he had another one around his wrist. His knees felt weak, so instead of standing back up he crab-walked to the foot of the bed and sat down with his back against it. Straightened his legs out before him on the floor. Then he dug the coins from his pocket and counted them. Yup—still 74p.
Danika! Not Daniela—Danika Gelsthorpe. God, he would never forget one of their names out there. Never underestimate how much I care for the
“I'm back. What’s down there? Did you find the screw?” asked Martin as he hung their jackets up behind the door.
Jon shook his head. “Forgot about it. I was looking for that hair tie.”
“Well you’re on your own there; I’m done finding things today. The screw can wait,” Martin laughed—“he’s got a whole bag inside that box in the library. Do you need a hand getting up?”
He let Martin help him. Both knees cracked; the world’s edges went dark for a second. “Thank you,” he said, and it came out more peremptory than he’d meant it.
“Statement time?”
“Right. You don’t mind? I can wait ’til we’ve both had a rest, if you don’t want to be in the room while I.”
“No, I’m alright; I’ll stay here.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you hated statements.”
Martin shrugged. “Not these ones so much, now that. Heh—they’re almost nostalgic, if I’m honest. ‘Can it be real? I think I’ve seen a monster!’”
“They are a bit,” agreed Jon, looking down at the plastic-sleeved statement and making himself smile.
“Go on. Seeing you feel better will make me feel better too.”
That made it a bit easier to motivate himself, Jon supposed. From the moment he’d lain down on the bed he’d felt like he was floating on gentle waves—like if he let himself listen to them he could fall asleep in seconds. But that wouldn’t make Martin feel better. And no guarantee it would him, either, once he woke up again. He rearranged the pillows behind himself so he’d have to sit up a little; this might help keep him awake, and it meant he could rest his elbows on the bed while he held up the statement, rather than having to lift them up before his eyes. It made his neck sore, a bit, this angle, but that was fine. That might help keep him awake, too.
He sighed, readying himself for speech. Then heard a click, and felt a familiar buzz and weight against his stomach. The tape recorder had manifested inside his hoodie’s kangaroo pocket.
“Statement of Miranda Lautz, regarding, er… a botched home-repair job. Heh. Seems appropriate. Original statement given March twenty-sixth, 2004. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.”
[Image ID: A digital painting of Jon and Martin on an old-fashioned canopy bed with white sheets and orange drapes. Jon sits on the near side of the bed, reading a paper statement. He frowns slightly, looking down at the statement in his hands; he wears round glasses perched low on his nose. He’s a thin man, with medium brown skin dotted by scars left from the worms, and another scar on his neck from Daisy's knife. His hair is long and curly, gray and white hairs among the black. Jon sits supported by pillows—several big, white, lace-trimmed ones behind his back, and one under his knees. His right leg is slightly crossed over his left ankle, on which a clean white bandage peeks out beneath his cuffed, dark green trousers. He wears an oversized red hoodie and red-toed brown socks. Sat on the far side of the bed, next to Jon but facing away from both him and the viewer, is Martin—a tall and fat white man with short, curly, reddish brown hair and a short beard. He has glasses and is wearing a dark blue jumper and gray-brown trousers. Past the bed on Martin’s side, the bedroom door hangs ajar; in this light, it and the wall glow bluish green. On the near side, though, the light grows warmer, the orange canopy behind Jon casting pink and brown tints onto the white pillows and sheets. End ID.]
It seemed to be a Corruption statement, or maybe the Spiral. Possibly the Buried? A leak in Ms. Lautz’s roof caused a pill-shaped bulge to appear in her kitchen ceiling, about the size of a bread loaf. Water burst from it like pus from an abscess (as she described it. Nothing else Fleshy though, so far). Ms. Lautz repaired the hole in her ceiling, but every morning a new one reappeared somewhere else. Sometimes they appeared bulging and pill-shaped like the first one; other times she found them already burst, covering the room in water shot through with dark specks like coffee grounds.
Jon wished he’d refilled his empty water glass before starting to record. His mouth was so dry that every time he pronounced an L his tongue stuck to its roof. At this point he’d welcome a hole to burst in it and flood his mouth with water. Then again, he did still have to pee.
Eventually she and her spouse hired someone to find out what was wrong with the roof. She described hearing boots tramping around up there for half a day while they checked out all the spots where she and Alex had reported leaks. The inside of Jon’s trouser leg pulled at the bandage on his shin, making it itch. The repair men told Ms. Lautz it’d be safer and barely any more expensive to replace the whole thing. The ring and little fingers of Jon’s left hand were starting to go numb from having that elbow too long pressed against the bed. Miranda and Alex thanked the roof people and sent them off, saying they’d think it over.
He began to regret crossing his legs this way. He’d balanced his right heel in the hollow between his left foot’s ankle and instep, and in the time since he’d arranged them that way gravity had slowly pushed his foot more and more to the side, widening that gap. By this time he was sure it was hyperextended—possibly subluxed? It hurt already, and, he knew, would hurt more when he tried to move it. This rather ruined his fantasy of heading straight for the toilet when he finished reading.
Martin was right; these old statements seemed positively tame, now. He knew he owed it to Ms. Lautz to engage with her fate, but?
No. No buts. Whatever hell she lived in now, it looked just like the one she was about to describe for him, only worse. You can’t even pretend you’re sorry she’s living out her worst fear if you stop in the middle of reading that fear’s origin story. Never underestimate how much I
Once the repair men had left, Miranda Lautz wandered into her kitchen for lunch. She found her ceiling bulging halfway to the floor, with the impression of a face and two twisted arms at its center. Like someone had fallen through her roof, head first. Jon’s stiff neck twinged in sympathy. Miranda screamed and strode to the other side of the house in search of beer, figuring she'd find better answers at the bottom of a bottle than in her own head. When she got back to the kitchen with them, the beer bottles didn’t know what to do either, but said—
“God damn it. Not ‘ales’—‘Alex’. Obviously.”
He let the statement’s pages flop over the back of his hand, let his head tip backward until the top of it bumped against headboard and his eyes faced the ceiling. That settled it, then, didn’t it. If he had the Ceaseless Watcher looking through his eyes, he wouldn’t make a mistake like that—and he certainly couldn’t change position while recording. On top of his more substantial regrets, Jon had spent their whole odyssey before they came to Upton House ruing that he’d sat at the dining-room table to read Magnus’s statement, rather than on the couch or the bed. The chairs at that table had plain, flat wood seats—no cushion, no contouring for the shape of an arse. When he opened the door to the changed world, the cataclysm had preserved his bodily sensations at that moment like a mosquito in amber. He’d had a sore tailbone and pins and needles down his legs for untold eons. Right up until he and Martin crossed from the Necropolis onto the grounds protected by Salesa’s camera, where his tailbone faded out of awareness and his head filled up with cotton.
“Ohhh. ‘Alex’. Okay, that makes a lot more sense,” laughed Martin meanwhile. Jon could feel Martin’s shoulder bouncing against his. “She must’ve written it in cursive, huh.”
“I can’t do this right now, Martin.”
“Oh—okay, yeah. You rest; I’ll finish it for you.”
Jon closed his eyes and let air gush out from his nostrils. But you hate the statements, he knew he should say. Wouldn’t this make it easier, though? To let Martin have out this last bit of denial first?
The tape recorder in his pocket still hissed, still warmed and weighted down his stomach like a meal.
“Thank you,” he said.
The operator on the phone said she and Alex should wait for the ambulance to arrive, rather than try to free the man in the ceiling by themselves. Jon turned his neck back and forth, hoping Martin couldn’t hear its joints’ snap/crackle/pop. He picked his elbow up off the bed and shook out his hand. But when the paramedics cut the ceiling open, only a torrent of water gushed into their kitchen—water flecked with a great deal of what looked like coffee grounds. A day or two later the roof people called, to ask if they’d decided whether to have the roof repaired or replaced. They assured her none of their employees had gone missing. At the time of writing, Miranda and Alex still hadn’t decided what to do about the roof. A week ago, they’d found a squirrel-shaped bulge in their bedroom ceiling; they’d packed their bags and come to stay with Alex’s sister in London.
“Right! That wasn’t so bad.” Martin set the statement down and stretched his arms over his head. “Huh.”
“Hm?”
“Oh, I don’t know, just—it’s been a while. Thought it might feel, I don’t know, worse than that? Or better, I guess, since the Eye’s so ‘fond’ of me now.”
“I don’t think they work here.”
“What?”
“The statements. The Eye can’t see their fear.”
“Oh.” Jon could feel Martin deflating. He let himself avalanche over to fill the space. “You don’t feel better, do you.”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s just—slower here, like it’s taking a while to load or something. Remember how long the tape recorder took to come on last time? It was like—you were like— ‘“Statement of Blankety Blank, regarding an encounter with”—Oh, right,’ click.”
That was true. The tapes had known Salesa would give a statement before it happened, but with these paper ones they’d seemed slow on the uptake. Martin had also sworn the recorder that manifested to tape Mr. Andrade’s statement was a different machine than the one Salesa’d spotted that first morning. Jon wondered which machine the one in his pocket was.
Not relevant, he decided. He shook his head in his palm, stroking the lids of his closed eyes. “No—if they worked here I wouldn’t be able to stop in the middle of one.” As soon as he said it he winced, bracing himself for argument.
After the change he remembered wailing to Martin about how he couldn’t stop reading Magnus’s statement—how its words had possessed his whole body, forced him to do the worst thing any person ever had, and forced him to like it, to feel Magnus’s triumph as they both opened the door. Martin had pressed Jon’s face into his clavicle, rubbed his nose in the scent of Daisy’s laundry soap, covered the back of Jon’s head with his hands. Tried to interpose what he must then have still called the real world between Jon and what he could see outside. He’d said over and over, I know, and We‘ll be okay. Jon had known that meant he wasn’t listening, and yet still hadn’t been prepared for the argument they had later, when he mentioned in sobriety the same things he’d wailed back then.
“Hang on”—Martin had pleaded—“no, that can’t be true. I’ve been interrupted in the middle of a statement loads of times—and I know you have too.”
“By outside forces, yes, but you can’t decide to stop reading one. Believe me, Martin, I wouldn’t have—”
“Tim did.”
“No, he didn’t—”
“Yes he did! He was gonna do one and then Melanie—”
“No, Martin, I’ve heard the tape you’re talking about. Tim introduced the statement but didn’t actually start—”
“He did so! He read the first bit, and then stopped. ‘My parents never let me have a night light. I was—’”
“‘Always afraid, but they were just’....” Behind his own eyes he’d felt the Eye shudder and throb with gratitude. Just that sort of stubborn, it had seemed to sing, in a bizarre combination of his own voice with Jonah’s with Melanie’s, which doubled down when I screamed or cried about something, instead of actually listening.
“Yeah,” said Martin, forehead wrinkling. “And then he said, ‘This is stupid,’ and stopped.”
“You’re right.”
Jon still had no satisfying answer to that one, and cursed himself for having opened that can of worms back up again. It had been Tim’s first-ever statement, he reminded himself, and maybe Tim had never intended to get even that far. Maybe he’d been waiting for someone to interrupt him, as Melanie eventually did. Even out there, the Eye couldn’t really show him things like that. He could find out what Tim had said—could look it up, as it were—and what he’d thought, but motivation was a bit too murky, multilayered, complicated. It wasn’t real telepathy? The vicarious emotions the Eye gave him access to worked in broad strokes, generalities—just like common or garden empathy. Sure, he could imagine other people’s points of view more vividly, now that he could see through their eyes. But he still had to imagine them to life, based on the clues around him and what emotions those clues stirred in him. It didn’t work well for situations like this; he could hear Melanie’s footsteps and feel Tim’s reluctance to read a statement, but that was it. Enough to concoct plausible explanations; not enough to pick out the truth from a list of them. Plausibilities were too much like hypotheticals.
In the timelessness since that argument with Martin, though, Jon had also wondered whether it mattered if Tim had read the statement before recording it. He didn’t have footage, as it were, of Tim doing so; either the Eye had more copies of the statement’s events than it needed already and so had deleted that one from storage, or, conversely, perhaps it could no longer see versions of it that relied too heavily on the pages Mr. Hatendi had written it on, since Martin had burned those. But Tim’s summary, before he started reading. Blanket, monster, dead friend. It was bad, sure (like the assistants’ summaries always were, a ghost of past Jon interposed). But it sounded like the summary of a man who’d read it with his mind on other things. Inevitable and gruesome end. How he tried to hide; he couldn’t. Not at all like that of someone skimming it for the first time as he spoke. He did rifle through the papers though? So Jon couldn’t be sure. The suspicion ate at his mind, especially here. Could he have kept the world from ending just by—reading Magnus’s statement, before he went to record it? The way he used to way back at the start, before he trusted himself to speak the words perfectly on the first try? You didn’t mean to record it, did you? No, I’m sure you told Melanie and Basira you were just going to
“Guess that makes sense,” Martin said now. “So, you’re still feeling…?”
“Not great?”
“Yeah.”
“I… I feel human, here.”
“Oh wow. That’s—”
Jon told himself to put the hope in Martin’s voice to bed as soon as possible. “I know I’m not—not fully.” He allowed a smile to twitch the corners of his lips, flared his nostrils around an exhale that almost passed as a laugh. “Most humans don’t spontaneously summon tape recorders. Or sleep with their eyes open.”
“Yeah, but still, you don’t think maybe—?”
Again Jon hastened to cut Martin off. “A-and even if I was, it’s. I know that should be a good thing? But—”
At this point Martin interposed, “Should be, yeah! You don’t think it might mean you could—I don’t know, go back to normal? If we stayed here for a while?”
“Maybe? I-I might stop craving the Eye so much, but we’d still have to go back out there eventually, to face Elias, and. To be honest with you, Martin?” He huffed a laugh out, bitterly. “My ‘normal’ wasn’t exactly...”
“Right.” Martin sighed. “So you mean you feel like you used to, as a human. Which was…”
“Not great.”
“Right.”
“I haven’t been very well, here.” Jon shrugged for the excuse to duck his head. He could feel himself blushing, the heat spilling from his face all down both arms. Good thing the tape recorder in his pocket had gone cold.
Next to him, Martin puffed air out of his cheeks. “Yeah, I know.”
“I’m dizzy and confused without the Eye, and it—it can’t fix me here? When I.” He drew in breath, lifted his heel off his ankle and set that leg to the side, letting its foot roll into Martin’s shin. Bit his lip and scrunched his nose in preparation. Flexed the other foot’s toes, trying to isolate the lever in his ankle that would—there. Clunk. Then a noisy exhale: “Jyyrrggh. When that happens,” he choked out, voice strained by both pain and nerves. “It’s like before I became an avatar. I have to fix it myself, and it doesn’t just.” Magically stop hurting, he hoped went without saying; already he could hear Martin sucking air through his teeth. It made Jon’s cheeks itch. “Shouldn’t have let myself get used to a higher standard, I suppose.”
“What? No—of course you should have. Did you think I was gonna say that?”
“No, of course not; I just meant—”
“You deserve to feel healthy, Jon.”
“Do I? Health is clumsy, it’s callous, it, it lets terrible things happen because they don’t feel real—it can’t imagine them properly, can’t understand what they mean….”
“Okay, first of all, ouch.” Jon snarled a laugh at that, without knowing whether Martin meant it as a joke. “Second of all, that is not why you—why the world ended, okay? Especially, ‘cause, you weren’t ‘healthy’ then. You read Elias’s bloody statement because you were starving, remember?”
“Hmrph,” pronounced Jon, to concede he was listening without either confirming or denying the point.
“And thirdly, you’re not ‘callous’ out there? You don’t”—a scoff interrupted his words. “You don’t ‘let things happen because they don’t feel real’—that’s sure not how I remember it. Okay? I remember you crying for—god, I don’t know, days, maybe? Weeks?—about how you could feel everything, and couldn’t stop any of it. That’s the thing we’re hiding from here, Jon, so if you don’t actually feel any healthier here then what even is the point?”
In a voice embarrassment made small Jon managed, “I mean? I’m still kind of having fun.”
“Really? You don’t seem like it—”
“Not today, maybe—”
“Right, yeah, no; spending all day trying to fix a doorknob isn’t exactly—”
“But I don’t want to leave yet. I should still have a few good days left before the distance from the Eye gets too….”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.” For a few seconds he tried to think of something better to say, then gave up and told the truth, though in a jocular voice to hide his self-consciousness. “Always was the person who got ill on holiday.”
“Oh, god, of course you were—”
Voice growing higher in pitch, Jon pleaded, “It didn’t usually stop me from enjoying it?”
“What about America?” laughed Martin. “Did you still enjoy that one?”
“Of course not—I got kidnapped.”
“I mean, yeah, but you were pretty used to that too by then, right?”
“God.” Jon sniffed, crunchily, reeling back in the snot he’d laughed out. “Besides. That was a business engagement.”
Martin acknowledged this comment with a quick Psh, as he turned himself around on the bed to face Jon a little more. “Can I trust you to”—he stopped.
“Yes.”
“No, let me—that wasn’t fair; I can’t ask you that yet.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, Martin; I didn’t—”
“Of me, I meant, it wasn’t fair.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I’ve been ignoring your distress all week because I wanted it not to matter.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘distress,’” pointed out Jon. “Plus, I have been sort of, er. Secretive, about it.”
The exasperation in Martin’s sigh was probably meant for him, not for Jon, the latter reminded himself. “Yeah, but you’re not subtle. I can tell when you’re hiding something. It wasn’t exactly a big leap to figure out what. But I told myself it was temporary, and that you were acting like.”
Jon laughed preemptively. “Yes?”
“Like a little kid in line for a theme-park ride.” Again Jon laughed—less at the comparison itself than at how much Martin winced to hear himself say it. “I’m sorry. I should’ve taken you more seriously.”
“And I should have told you what was going on with me.”
“Yup,” concurred Martin at once.
“I know you hate it when I keep things from you.”
“I do—I hate it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry too.” Martin waved this away like a fly. “I just—you said you think we’ve got a few more days, before it gets too much or whatever.”
“Yes.”
“Can I trust you to tell me when we need to leave?”
Jon tried not to answer too quickly, knowing vaguely that that might sound insincere. “Yes,” he said again, after pausing for a second. “You can trust me.”
“Okay? Don’t try to spare my feelings, or anything like that. Like—don’t just go, ‘Oh, well, he’s having a good time. That’s fine; I don’t have to.’ Yeah? ‘Cause I won’t have a good time if I’m worried you’re secretly suffering.”
This Jon did know; it sent a thrill of recognition down his spine, as he remembered their first day’s ping-pong adventure. “Right. I’ll do my suffering as publicly as possible.”
“Uh huh.” Martin’s arm tightened around Jon’s shoulder. “Just don’t worry about disappointing me? I mean, sure, I like it here, with the whole ‘not being an evil wasteland’ thing, but I’d much rather be out there with you happy than with you than spend one more minute in paradise with her.”
With a smile, Jon replied, “That might just be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Yeah, yeah. Come on. We’ve got a job to do.”
“I suppose we do.”
As they walked on out of the range of Salesa’s camera, Jon glanced backward one more time and thought, Yes, that makes sense—but couldn’t quite recall what he had expected to see. It was like when you look at a clock, and tick Check the time off your mental to-do list, then realize you never internalized what time it was. “Pity,” he mused.
“What?”
“It’s, er, going away. That peace, the safety, the memory of ignorance.”
“That’s… Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Do you remember any of it? W-What Salesa said? Annabelle?”
“Some, I think. It’s, uh… do you mind filling me in?”
“Wait, you need me to tell you something for once?”
“I guess so. It’s, er… it’s gone. Like a dream. What was it like?”
After a pause Martin said, “Nice. It was… it was really nice.”
“Even though Annabelle was there?”
“I mean, yeah, but she didn’t do anything,” shrugged Martin. “Except cook for us. That was weird.”
“She cooked?” Jon watched Martin nod and smile around a wince. “And we let her do that? I let her do that?”
With a scoff Martin answered, “Under duress, yeah.”
“Huh.” Jon twirled his cane in circles, wondering why he’d thought he would need it. “Well, she didn’t poison us, apparently.”
“Nope. And believe me, we had that conversation plenty of times already. Er—maybe just let me put that away for you before you take somebody’s eye out, yeah?”
Jon nodded, folded his cane and handed it to Martin, then made himself laugh. “Was I… a bit neurotic about it.”
“About Annabelle?” Again Jon nodded. “Oh, we both were. We kept switching sides—one day I’d be like, ‘But she’s got four arms, Jon!’ and the next you’d be like—”
“She had four arms?”
“Yup. And six eyes. But your powers didn’t work there, so we thought maybe hers didn’t either? Never did find out for sure. God—you remember the day we got locked out of our room?”
“Er….”
“So that’s a no, then.”
“Sorry.”
Martin’s lips billowed in a sigh. “No, don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”
“So… what happened? Who locked us out? Was it Annabelle?”
“No, no, no one locked us out. It was just me, I uh—I sorta broke the doorknob? God, it was awful. Went to open it and the whole thing just came off in my hand, like” (he made the motion of turning a doorknob in empty air, and imitated the sound Jon figured it must have made coming off) “krrruk-krr.” Jon fondly laughed; he could imagine Martin’s horror at breaking something in a historic mansion. “It was just one screw that came loose, though, so you’d think, easy fix, right? Except the bloody screwdriver took forever to find. Turns out Salesa kept them in the library, of all places.”
“S-sorry—what does this have to do with Annabelle?”
“Oh—nothing ultimately, just.” Martin grimaced at his own recollection. “God, we had this whole argument over whether to ask her about it, and when I finally did can you guess what she told us?”
“What?” managed Jon; his throat felt small and weak all of a sudden.
Martin put a finger to his chin, and blinked his eyes out of sync. “‘Perhaps he keeps them next to something that breaks a lot,’” he recited, with an inane, self-congratulating smile. For a fraction of a second Jon could recognize it as Annabelle’s I’ve-just-told-a-riddle expression. But the memory faded and he could picture her face only as he’d seen it in pictures before the change.
“O…kay. And was that… true?”
“I mean, yeah, technically. Useless, though. And after we spent so long agonizing over whether it was safe to ask her….”
Jon allowed himself a cynical laugh. “Are you sure she didn’t orchestrate the whole thing?”
“Ugh—no, it wasn’t her. We had this conversation at the time. You made me check for cobwebs and everything.”
“And you… didn’t find any?”
“Of course not, Jon; it was a doorway.”
“Right. Doorway, yes.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling better? You still seem a bit….”
“No, I’m—I feel fine, I just can’t seem to. Retain anything concrete about… where did you say it was? Upton House? God that’s strange, that it would just be….”
Part of Jon felt tempted to deplore it as a waste of space, on the apocalypse’s part. These stretches of empty land were one thing, but a mansion? Couldn’t they at least get a Spiral domain out of it?
“I mean, not really. He told us all about it, remember? With the magic camera?”
“Right, yes,” Jon agreed.
“Well, we got it all on tape, if you want to listen to it later.”
“Yes, that sounds—all of it?”
“Well not the whole week or anything. It just came on whenever it thought it was important, I guess.”
“So not the part about the doorway.”
“Nope.”
“Pity.”
#tma fic#the magnus archives#rqbb2021#rusty quill big bang 2021#jonmartin#jonathan sims#martin blackwood#suddenly a tma blog#scri wrote something
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39 FOR THE PROMPTS PLEASE AAAAA
LOOK OK, i’m going to start by saying this one... got away from me a little bit. And I didn’t originally mean to combine the prompts, and neither are technically correct. BUT consider you can’t stop me
39. Kissing tears from the other’s face.
30. Pulling away from a kiss, whispering words of love against each other’s lips.
Cw; This takes place after the unknowing but before Jon wakes up in canon, and Martin starts in a rough headspace. Also accidental compulsion.
(This is actually a sorta part-2 to the pre-unknowing ficlet I did! Tho u don’t gotta read it to understand it works as a standalone too. Anyway welcome to the AU ZONE)
EDIT: fixed a typo
Martin usually visits Jon on Thursday.
He used to visit every day. But the nurses began to give him looks after the first month, and it was hard to balance checking on Jon with regular life things like groceries, laundry, and work. So he’s cut back. If only to preserve his sanity.
He considered Sunday. But Sunday is the day he visits his mum, another thing that has been hard to balance with- well. Everything. Besides, it’s hard to stack that much heartbreak into one day.
The receptionist gives him a funny look. He would give himself a funny look too, he looks a wreck, he knows it. She knows him, so seeing him on a wednesday looking like he crawled out of the back end of hell. Or maybe just hasn’t done any laundry for a few days. Or showered. And got in a fight and lost.
He’s already waited too long though, he thinks. He... well. It’s his last chance, he supposes. If Jon isn’t coming back, then...
Yeah.
It’ll be for the best.
He turns the knob on the door, he knows what he’ll say. Even if he’s talking to a dead man he needs a speech apparently. And-
He bounces off of something- or someone. Who trips back a step in turn.
“Oh god- I’m so sorry-” He says almost automatically.
“No, don’t worry about it I wasn’t-”
“I wasn’t even looking where I was going a-and-”
“Really it’s fine-”
The man isn’t a nurse, Martin’s sees that much. He’s tall-ish. Handsome, certainly. Definitely no-one he’s ever met. And certainly no-one he thinks might have a reason to visit Jon. Not that Jon shouldn't get handsome visitors, but- well. He doesn’t- didn’t? Have many people outside of the institute he ever talked about. And so this guy turning up out of the blue is... well.
“Er- I’m sorry, but who... who are you?” He’s not- he’s not upset. that this random stranger is visiting Jon. It’s just weird is all. Yeah. Really weird, actually.
“Oh! I- I’m- I’m a friend of Jons.” The man says with an awkward smile, his eyes darting down to his shoes for a moment as he says it. “Er- Antonio.” He tacks the name on like an afterthought. This time his gaze flicks somewhere around Martin's shoulder, he shuffles on his feet.
Martin’s never been an expert at picking up on lies, not to say he’s bad at it. He just doesn’t find it something to worry about generally. But it’s hard not to notice when ‘Antonio’ is basically holding an imaginary blinking neon sign that says ‘I AM LYING’ with accompanying metaphorical Morse code with the same message.
He swears he’s heard that name before though.
“Oh. Er- he’s never um, talked about you?” he says carefully.
“Oh, yeah. Very old friends. Haven’t um- talked in a while.” ‘Antonio’ waves a hand awkwardly. And casting consistent looks towards the elevator.
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyway! I’m uh- I’ll be going now. Visits over stuff to do y’know.” He’s already walking away as he says it, backing up for a moment and casting a quick wave before trotting away down the hall.
“Oh, y-yeah. Sure, bye?” Martin waves- though ‘Antonio’ isn’t looking. Watching as he basically runs down the hall.
“Bye!” ‘Antonio’ throws over his shoulder as he turns the corner to the elevators.
Well then.
“Huh.”
That’s not how he thought this visit was going to start.
He pauses for a moment. He’d been working off of something of a momentum. Check in with the nurse, make his speech. And be ready to say his goodbyes. But that... whatever just happened. Well, it threw him off.
He sighs.
It doesn’t matter. Weirdo visiting Jon. Seems about right, actually. If he thinks about it. Probably left a statement somewhere too, just to complete the weird weird picture.
The word ‘weird’ is starting to sound less like the a word the more he thinks about it.
He pushes the door to the hospital room open, he knows he’s imagining it. But the air feels heavier. The dread of the situation. The finality. Jon is still there, unmoving in his hospital bed. There's several machines tucked into the corner, they’d unhooked him from everything after the first month when it became clear that this is simply his state of being. That’s also about the time the nurses started telling him Jon probably wasn’t waking up.
He’s not going to wake up. Martin knows he’s not going to wake up. He’s been fooling himself for so long but now with the flesh attack he needs to do something. Or at the very least stop feeling like he’s doing nothing. But being miserable isn’t a solution either.
Maybe there is no solution. Maybe it’s just, problems. Stuff he can’t fix or deal with and just- has to let it follow him until he dies.
He shifts, and his ankle twinges.
He’d tripped. It’s so stupid, it wasn’t even the monsters. He’d just- fallen and ended up hiding in a side room while everyone else dealt with meaty things crawling out of the floorboards. Just sat and hid and did nothing.
He’s tired of doing nothing.
Jon snores, interrupting his train of thought.
Martin smiles, god he’d forgotten Jon did that. Those little snorting snores- he’d only heard them a few times, back at the institute. It had scared the hell out of him the first time he’d been living-
Wait.
What?
Martin blinks. And watches as Jon scrunches his nose, making a small irritated noise- and turns over.
What.
His head skips, rewinds. Plays what he just saw back. Jon is breathing, how long has he been breathing? Doesn’t matter, he’s breathing which means he’s alive but what-
That weird guy. “Antonio”
He’s gone, Martin knows he’s gone. But he checks anyway. Even running all the way to the elevators. But he’s gone.
And Jon...
Jon is alive.
The thought hits his brain, and then slips away like a wet fish. There’s no guarantees. This could be a fluke, this could be a trap. It might not even be Jon. Just... something that looks like him, and snores like him. And-
A nurse taps him on the shoulder. And he realizes he’s been staring at the elevators for, well, he doesn’t know how long. Long enough to catch several concerned glances from passers-by though.
“Are you alright sir?” She asks, politely. He recognizes her, he chatted with her once when visiting Jon. She’s nice. She does the check ups a lot of the time, one of the few who’ll actually do it.
“He’s alive.” He says flatly, instead of answering. Because he’s not sure what the answer to the question is anyway.
The doctors do tests, though not many. According to them he’s fine. Fit as a fiddle aside from some fatigue and a little confusion. Which clearly makes them uncomfortable. Which he understands. A man wakes up from a three-month coma like he’d just rolled out of bed on a Monday morning? It makes him uncomfortable too, he thinks.
Basira drops off a statement. ‘Just felt like I should’ she’d said when he asked why. And neither of them felt particularly good about that answer.
After the statement he’s fine, not even fatigued. He’s alive.
He keeps looking at Martin.
Martin isn’t sure why he doesn’t want to look back.
Maybe it’s because it still feels like a trap, all of a sudden he comes back with no- no fanfare no effort. Right as rain and just... there.
Nobody else wants to deal with him right now- not after he just pulled a Lazarus like that. Jon wants to go to the institute. But Martin isn’t having it. He just woke up from a three-month coma. He’s going home. And yes- his lease apparently expired before the unknowing, so he doesn’t have a place to stay. And yes the only person willing to give him a place to stay is Martin. And Martin... well, it’s Jon. and even if it wasn’t, in the wake of losing three months of his life- and a friend. Or someone who had been a friend at a point before this all went to hell. He wouldn’t leave him alone for anything.
Martin tries to force himself to come to terms with it as they both climb into his car- this is what he wanted. He should be overjoyed. But it feels... it feels like if he looks at Jon for too long he’ll just... disappear. Or stop breathing again. Or stop being Jon.
“Good to see not too much has changed while I was gone.” Jon says wryly as he wrestles with the seatbelt. Which squeaks as he struggles to pull it out far enough to actually fasten it.
Martin just hums in response. Not trusting his voice not to betray whatever it is he’s feeling right now.
The drive to his flat is mostly quiet, aside from a few awkward attempts at conversation from Jon that all fall miserably flat. Eventually he gives up, and the rest of the drive is spent in silence.
It’s not too far from the hospital to his flat. So before he knows it he’s leading Jon up the steps to his home.
It’s not much, he knows. Can’t afford anything truly fancy when carrying medical bills around. But it’s nice, homey. He hopes.
“Home sweet home.” He says, dropping his keys on the table by the door and hoping he sounds cheery. Because he doesn’t know what else to be right now. He’s figured out what emotion he’s feeling, though he’s not sure it counts as an emotion honestly.
Numb.
Stupid, isn’t it?
“The bathrooms down the hall- I think your stuff’s all in storage at the moment,” his voice wobbles at that, he swallows “so we’ll have to go get that soon. You can help yourself to anything in the fridge-” He’s stopped by a hand on his wrist. Familiar, too-thin, and cool.
“Martin.” Jon says. “Did I... did I do something to upset you?” It’s a question, small and helpless. Martin just wants to brush it off, he’s fine. He just needs time-
“You died, Jon.” He says instead. The words coming out unbidden.
“I- I came back.” He tightens his grip on Martins wrist for a moment before loosening “In one piece even. I believe that was a part of our agreement” There’s a note of teasing in that last part, Martin wishes it was funny.
“I said come back safe Jon, not ‘come back from the dead’” Jon's hand drops from his wrist.
“Do you not... Are you not glad I’m back?” He sounds- sad. Of course he sounds sad Martin basically just said he wished he'd died.
“Of course I’m glad your back, I just-”
“Then what’s wrong?” The words are just- they’re just words. But Martin feels something pull in his chest.
Martin looks at Jon for the first time since the hospital.
“I’m scared, Jon! I You were dead for three months, Y-you didn’t even have a heartbeat and I-” He brings a hand upland runs it through his hair, Jon doesn’t need to hear this. He should be resting not listening to Martin dump his issues like this- “you were dead and I was the only one left. A-and yeah you came back, but- god what even is this! You’re just, fine. A-and I’m- I don’t want you to not be fine but I- I can’t even prove to myself that you’re real and not- I-I don’t-” He forces himself to stop. clamping his jaw shut around the words that suddenly feel like they’re pushing at the back of his throat like bile. Jon stares back at him, eyes wide and confused and hurt. He’s disheveled and still wearing the pajamas Martin had brought for him in the first week. Small and tired and maybe even real. He looks at Jon until he can’t because his vision begins to blur and his eyes begin to burn.
“Martin, I- I’m- I’m sorry I-” Jon's blurry form moves, and Martin shuts his eyes. Shaking his head. He should be the one apologizing, Jon didn’t need to hear that and he just- threw it at him.
“I’m-” Martin tries to apologize, but it comes out as little more than a croak. Cool hands cup his cheeks, and he opens his eyes. Jon's face is closer now, eyes scanning desperately over Martin's face.
“I- I’m not- I don’t know what I am but I’m- I-I’m me. I-I promise, I don’t know how to prove it to you but I-” Jon starts, and Martin can see his lips move to form the words-
Jon is here, he’s alive. He’s awake. His hands are on Martin's cheeks and he’s running his thumb through the tear tracks, fumbling over awkward reassurances. and looking so, so earnest. Hell, he made a joke about a conversation nobody else heard. Something just between the two of them, nobody else. And to fear entities, maybe that doesn’t matter. But for now, with Jon so close and acting so perfectly imperfectly Jon. Martin can let- no. Make himself believe. Jon’s not dead, it’s not a trap. Not right now, not yet. Just for right now, Martin isn’t alone anymore.
It doesn’t take much to lean forward, pressing their lips together. Jon makes a small, cut-off sound of surprise before melting into it, letting a hand move to the back of Martin's hair and the other fall to his shoulder. Martin's arms wrapping around Jon's waist.
Eventually they have to part for air. Martin doesn’t open his eyes, but he can feel Jon's breath on his face, and his hand in his hair and it’s all just another reminder he’s alive. And so wonderfully real.
He feels Jon move after a moment, using the hand he’s left on the back of Martin's head to guide him down. Pressing now-warm lips to the wet patches on his cheeks. Martin tries to laugh, he’s not sure why. It all just seems a little absurd all of a sudden. but it comes out as sort of a wet hiccup. Prompting Jon to tilt his head, and lock their lips together again.
Martin doesn’t know how long they stand in his entryway, trading kisses and just... being in each other's arms. But it’s long enough he’s run out of tears for Jon to try to kiss away, and the strange wired feeling has faded. Leaving him tired and heavy and in desperate need of a lie-down.
He pulls back, though not far. He can still feel Jon's lips against his as he speaks.
“Please don’t die again.” He says softly.
Jon sighs, pressing a small, chaste kiss against his lips.
“I’ll do my best,” he says, and Martin can feel the words as Jon's mouth brushes his as much as he hears them. And then he kisses Martin again, like he’s trying to seal the words there with his lips.
And, Martin supposes that promise was enough last time. It might be more than enough for him now.
#tma#the magnus archives#ficlet#jmart#jonmartin#Jonathan sims#Martin blackwood#Ghostly scribble#Ghostly scribbles#coulson-is-an-avenger
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ASH’S TOP 10 TMA FIC RECS
For @damcrows who is Suffering. (I’ll make a second rec list with only fluff fics I promise <3)
immortal with a kiss by yellow_ caballero
In accordance with the Ride or Die Pact of 2009, Jonathan Sims can call upon Georgie Barker at any time for aid with no strings attached. Despite their rocky history, their childhood friendship, and Jon’s barely recovered alcoholism, this pact is sacred and must be upheld.
Georgie Barker may regret this. She may regret it when she discovers that the world is full of monsters and eldritch gods and dickhead managers. She may regret it when a punk rocker who should be dead collapses on their doorstep, a teenager again who needs their help. She may regret it when her stupid ex-boyfriend starts selling his soul for knowledge and the ability to keep his new family safe.
But she probably won’t. Georgie isn’t scared of anything - not a Clown’s apocalypse, not the apocalypse that Jon is destined to begin, and not Jon’s own loss of humanity.
Maybe she should be.
1000/10 the best fanfic in this fandom. It’s got everything: QP Jon/Georgie, Teen!Gerald, Beholding lore, and everyone bullies Jon. (Head trigger warnings)
daisy time travels and jon suffers au by paper_dream
In which Daisy time travels back from the apocalypse, saves Jon from herself, and just kinda forgets he has no idea what's going on.
Daisy timetravels to pre-Buried. Jon suffers.
The Magnus Institute vs the 21st Century: a series of emails and IMs by shinyopals
I'm sure given your position you already know about the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation next year, wrote Peter Lukas, to Elias Bouchard. However, the Lukas family wishes to be crystal clear that our continued investment is contingent upon the Institute taking its responsibilities with regards to privacy and confidentiality seriously.
The Magnus Institute hires a Data Protection Officer. He sets about diligently booking in meetings, writing policy documents, and training all the staff in the importance of confidentiality. Now if only he could get hold of the Head Archivist, who seems to have vanished again...
(Jon is only trying to save the world, but apparently some people think he should still be doing his day job.)
10/10. Fun take on the texting/email trope. Jon pines and destroys laptops. IT suffers.
ceylon, assam, and darjeeling by sciosa
People do not bring Jonathon Sims tea. Martin Blackwood, newly-minted archival assistant, has apparently not received this memo.
It’s about the pining.
ways to save the world by Wildehack
“I left you,” Martin says softly.
Really REALLY good pining, Jon in the Lonely and brief amnesia.
from the highways to the hills, our love has never had a leg to stand on by blackwood (transjon)
She always forgets how observant he is because digging anything meaningful out of him can be a chore. He looks at things. He observes. He catalogues. Georgie is like a library patron trying to check out a book labeled REFERENCE ONLY with a bright red piece of tape wrapped around the spine.
Pre-canon canon compliant character study of Jon/Georgie.
same as it ever was by ajkal2
It’s a nice dress. Classy, if also a little risqué. Set off against dark skin, it looks very good. It would probably work on Jon, actually. He wonders where she got it. Then he remembers he’s at work, and abruptly derails that train of thought.
-
The women of the Magnus Institute are holding a protest against the sexist dress code of their place of work. Jon is conflicted, and also has a gender for some reason. What's up with that?
THEE they/them fic. Nonbinary Jon? Check. Trans Martin? Check. The Anti-Elias Agenda? Check. Tim in a cocktail dress? Check check check. This fic has everything.
remind me how to smile bytamerofdarkstars
Jon is probably fine, just hiding out somewhere while the whole murder thing blows over and that's... fine. Martin is fine with that explanation. Really. He's got plenty to distract himself - like listening through the entire What the Ghost episode library, for example. Or watching Georgie Barker's Instagram livestreams.
A oneshot during Jon’s stay with Georgie. Tons of fluff.
Milk After Spiders by chewsdaychillin
Warm milk is all he gets.
After that door closes and the world is eerily slammed back to normal, Jon’s legs unfreeze and he stumbles back off the step. Makes the journey home alone and wobbly, no desire left for exploring (it won’t return for a long time).
basically sad jon childhood and adulthood hurt/comfort but the comfort is mad delayed :/
Jon suffers. That’s the fic.
Family, Found by Dribbledscribbles
It’s Basira who catches onto it.
The collective shift that seems to come over them when heading in or out of the Institute. Not just the oppressive sensation of being observed, their every move catalogued for the voyeuristic cravings of some unseen Eye(s). That feeling remained with them even when they left the Institute these days, but it was always stronger inside its walls. That wasn’t the change. Nor was it the point.
The point was: making life worse for Jonathan Sims.
JON SUFFERS. THAT’S THE FIC.
#tma#tma fic recs#tma rec list#the magnus archives#jonathan sims#jon sims#martin blackwood#jmart#jmartin#fanfic#ash recs
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"Do that again and you’ll regret it.” Give me some protective jonmartin.
Here you go! This takes place somewhere in Season Four, for context.
He shouldn’t be up there.
Martin told him to stay away, to stop following him and ‘knowing’ his location. And Jon respected that, truly.
But it wasn’t technically against the rules to wander on the third floor where Elias’s office happened to be. He wasn’t forbidden from any part of the Institute. Jon had as much a right as anyone to go on walkabout and pass by the door. He shivered, wondering if Martin could sense he was nearby. Was that something he was capable of? The Lonely was tricky, and trying to know Peter Lukas’s plans hadn’t ended well.
He had to bite down the familiar pang of anxiety that shot through his chest as he came in sight of the door. Jon remembered the times he spent in here, first as a lowly researcher, thinking he was about to get fired and instead getting promoted. And then times that followed- Elias’s frustration with his lack of progress, Jon’s pleas for CO2 during the Prentiss incident, the paranoid searching. Worst, though, were the times when Jon actually got some answers. He remembered bleeding on Elias’s floor after the confrontation with Daisy and being dead on his feet as he defended him from Melanie’s attack. He found that almost preferable to the cold, harsh silence that greeted him today.
And it was getting colder. Daisy had stolen him a thick wool cardigan from Basira’s desk that he was wearing now, though it barely protected him from the current chill. It was almost icy, and there was a strange fogginess to the air that clouded his vision. The ache of old injuries intensified, as it always did in the cold. He was supposed to have so much power, and yet he felt annoyingly helpless and vulnerable.
“And what do you think you’re doing, Archivist?” The voice was cheery and bright, but somehow empty.
Peter Lukas.
He turned to find him standing in front of the door, at odds with the austere decoration of the Institute in his weather-beaten coat and worn trousers. Elias’s choice in colleagues had always confounded him and Lukas was no different. Jon wrapped his arms around his torso, a sad attempt at warmth as he struggled to find a response. “I’m- I’m just l-looking-”
Peter scoffed, his expression blasé. “God, you’re a sad little thing. Why did Elias pick you, I wonder?” Jon scowled, the offense enough to muster up some fight within him.
“I-I want to talk to Martin,” he said, attempting authority and failing around chattering teeth. He was never fond of the cold, but this...this he could feel in his bones. “I-I need to...to speak with him-”
“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” Peter theatrically sighed, as if breaking terrible news to a friend. “Why do you think he sent me out here?”
Jon flinched at the words. Would Martin really do that, send Peter Lukas in his stead? Was he so opposed to seeing Jon that he’d throw him to the wolves, or lone wolf, in this case? He wouldn’t- he wouldn’t-
“It’s no wonder that girl scratched her eyes out, having to be around you lot day in and day out.” The words were so casually said and yet brutal in their message. Lukas was getting closer, and Jon took a stumbling step back. “And the Detective? She’d rather travel the globe, going on imaginary monster hunts instead of handling the one in her office.” Monster. Monster. Monster. The cold was closing in and Jon was trapped against the wall as his vision started to fade.
It was true. Nothing Peter said was objectively wrong, and the both of them knew it. Jon was alone, as he always had been and always would be. Only wanted as a pawn in someone’s grand plan with no worth otherwise. Give him his lines and he’d follow the script, desperate to deliver.
“And the hunter? What does she see in you? A friend? No, I don’t think so.” Jon sank to the floor as Peter towered above him, his words taunting. “I think she sees prey. An unfinished hunt. Just biding her time, and then-” A snap of his fingers. Jon dimly registered that the man was still talking, but he couldn’t hear him anymore. Just howling winds and then that cold, unbearable nothing.
He was so tired. It was nice to see nothing. Maybe he should stay here, wherever here was, cold and alone and unable to cause any harm. Wouldn’t it be a relief, to be forgotten and ignored instead of pitied and blamed? The hurt was a dull ache but a sharp relief to his usual agony. Yes, it would be nice to stay.
But then there was a warmth. Not much, barely worth mentioning. But it was there, and it was strange.
“What are you…”
Was someone touching his arm? No, that wasn’t possible. He was alone. Had always been alone and-
“...only having some fun, Martin-”
Martin. That was a good name. Soft, warm and familiar. His mind played a nasty trick, imagining Martin gently holding him, rubbing warmth back into his arms. It was a solid memory, as if it were right in front of him. The fog was dissipating and his thoughts became less muddied. He was...he was somewhere again. But where? A voice cut through the remaining fog.
“Do that again and you’ll regret it.”
Martin. His voice was cold and angry, but it didn’t matter. Martin was here. Martin was here and holding him safe and close. He wanted to meet his eyes, wanted to match the voice to the face. But he didn’t, instead burrowing close in the man’s arms.
“Oh, I hope you know what you’re doing.” The disappointed voice that sent him to that desolate place was back and Jon gripped at Martin’s jumper, fighting an urge to cover his ears as the wind picked up and the cold leeched in and-
“Jon, it’s alright. He’s gone, okay? I won’t let him do that again, I promise.” He was rubbing a hand up and down Jon’s back in comfort, a touch he barely remembered but eagerly welcomed. It took a few minutes for the shaking to subside, all the while Martin kept up that soothing murmur. He finally pulled back but only slightly, just enough to meet Martin’s eyes. They were warmer and kinder than they’d been in some time. He wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t seem angry. Jon wanted to thank him, beg him to stay at his side but all that comes out is a tiny whisper.
“I-I was alone.”
Martin paused, considering Jon’s words.
“Now you’re not.”
It was not a promise. Jon knew that. Martin wouldn’t leave his lonely office, but he was still in there, somewhere, with his unknowable plans and fiercely loving heart. Jon saw it in the way he helped him down to the Archives, not saying a word as he deposited him on the couch into Daisy’s waiting hands. Jon tasted it in the tea he made before he returned upstairs, warm and overly-sweet and just the way he liked it. He felt it when he woke up in his cot, curled in a familiar blue jumper.
Martin wasn’t back, no. But he wasn’t lost.
ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27942674
#my writing#tma#the magnus archives#jonathan sims#martin blackwood#jonmartin#jon/martin#hurt/comfort#angst#season four#Anonymous
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Too Much
https://archiveofourown.org/works/26972698
When Jon stalked back into the archives the fierce conviction in his face belied his ragged appearance. Tim wasn’t stupid. He’d known there was something shady happening in this place probably before Jon did, considering. It didn’t stop him from purposefully hardening his heart against his pallid skin and bloody throat, his poorly bandaged hand, his filthy, mud-covered clothes.
“Jon?” Martin’s voice was soft and it set off a trembling in him that Tim could see from across the room. “Hey--” Without warning, Jon bent double over the nearest wastebasket, going down hard on his knees as he emptied his stomach painfully, shaking so hard the bin rattled. “Oh, oh, Jon.” Hands fluttering over his back, Martin hovered close, unsure of what to do, before settling next to him on the floor to hold his hair back, plaiting it loosely to keep it out of the way.
“Nngh...s’sorry.” Jon collapsed the rest of the way, resting his weight over the bin, his forehead on the arm slung across the top. “I, I...clean. Clean it up.” Shuddering, voice thick and wavering on a heavy breath. “God, I. I’m so, so sorry.” Another bout of dry heaving cleaved through him, Martin’s hushed reassurances making the ire in Tim rise to vitriolic levels and if he stayed any longer in this room he knew he’d do something to upset Martin. Physical violence had never been the way he preferred to resolve disputes but the confirmation of being trapped here. Trapped by Jon made him desperately want to lash out. Scream. Kick. Throw a tantrum and that wouldn’t do, even if the anger and dissolution flooding into every empty space left behind by the deaths of Danny and Sasha and his freedom begged him to take it out on the one thing left that represented it all.
“Tim, where are you going?” Martin’s attention was still focused primarily on the man panting under his palms, but he spared him a glance.
“Can’t be here for a while.” He flashed a bitter smile. “Guess I’ll be back, won’t I?” He was suffocating and if he stayed here one second longer he’d explode and Martin didn’t deserve that.
Martin had his hands full of a sick and shivering Jon so had no choice but to let Tim go. It was probably best at the moment. He’d been sniping at Jon even before he’d disappeared and the fury flashing behind his eyes wouldn’t help anyone right now. And besides, Jon was going to pass out any minute by the look of it.
“Jon?” His head jerked up and he swayed where he kneeled.
“Sorry, s’sorry…” the slurred apologies certainly weren’t a good sign. “‘L’get this cleaned up.” When he moved clumsily to do so, Martin stopped him with a hand on his cheek, ignoring his temperature for now in favor of attempting to catch his unfocused gaze.
“Let me worry about that later.” And Jon looked stricken, but when Martin pulled him to his unsteady feet he was more concerned with staying upright, embarrassment shoved unceremoniously to the back of his mind. “Can you stand?” Whole, long seconds passed and Martin almost asked again, but Jon took a wobbly step only to topple into the taller man who caught him up and held him close.
“S’sorry.” Martin hitched him a little higher. “Dizzy. Jus’...ah.”
“It’s alright, Jon.” Who knew having a cot in the archives would prove to be so useful and Martin was grateful for it now, lowering him as gently as he could. “Nothing to be sorry for.” The hiss of pain sucked through his clenched teeth didn’t bode well. “I’ll be back.” With the first aid kit, warm water, maybe a change of clothes--he was pretty sure he had a few things. They’d be big on him but certainly cleaner than what he was in now. When he returned with his supplies, Jon had tipped onto his side, apparently asleep, and Martin was careful to wake him slow, worried when he didn’t seem to remember where he was or what was happening. With him so sluggish and lethargic, Martin wasn’t sure where to start (maybe a 999 call), deciding top to bottom was as good a plan as anything. Forcing cheer into his tone, he talked about what had been happening while he'd been away, dipping a cloth, wringing it out, and wiping the muck off his skin, noting the pallor in his face underneath all of the dirt. He had the start of a pretty intense fever and looking at him it wasn’t hard to puzzle out why but the only thing for it right now was water and rest.
Jon pushed him away when he began on his neck and it took Martin several minutes to talk him back down, convince him that he was safe before he was allowed to hold a warm compress over the gash across his throat to loosen the blood. It was deeper than it looked and longer than he’d have liked; another brutal scar to add to his growing collection and how was any of it fair? Butterfly stitches applied and covered over with clean bandages, Martin gave Jon a break and kept urging him to drink. He was so silent, focused on pulling in short and shallow breaths, and Martin kept his questions to himself, trying to ease the ruined jumper over his shoulders when it became clear that he was too sore to do it on his own. Each centimeter bared developing bruises just beginning to black and Jon’s breath hitched the higher he was forced to raise his arms, exposing more over his stomach, his ribs and Martin couldn’t help himself.
“What happened?”
“Mm?”
“These bruises?” He ran a delicate thumb over the edge of one, watched him shiver in response.
“Oh…” Martin got the impression Jon was answering from somewhere far away and didn’t blame him. “Asked questions.” He didn’t elaborate and Martin moved on to his hands, draping the blanket over him while he unwrapped old dressings and examined the burn spanning his entire palm and fingers. He didn’t want to think about the shape of it, like he’d shaken hands with the wrong sort, and instead examined the broken blisters lining the long, ruined fingers of both hands, cleaning them gently and applying salves and more bandages before slipping a worn jumper over his head and joggers onto narrow hips, tying the cords to keep them secure. Jon was too pliant, too submissive, more than spent after whatever he’d been through and he sighed in heavy relief when he was finally allowed to lay down.
“Better?” Martin brushed some stray curls out of his face after tucking him in and he nodded.
“Tired.”
“You can sleep, it’s alright.” Jon forced heavy lashes apart, closed them again when Martin swept light fingertips over them. “I’ll keep watch. You’re safe.”
Late into the next day, Martin saw Jon back to Georgie’s flat where he immediately curled up in bed with the Admiral, clutching his borrowed clothes, so baggy they dwarfed his small frame and made the vulnerability in him that much more. He shared a cup of tea, spoke with Georgie in a hushed voice and urged her to keep an eye on him if he’d let her. She nodded resolutely and wished him luck when he left to return to the institute.
“Well?” Basira accosted him immediately as soon as he stepped through the door.
“Christ, Basira!” Hand over his heart, Martin calmed his racing heart, suddenly surrounded by the lot of them.
“Well?”
“He’s exhausted.”
“Aren’t we all?” Martin ignored Tim’s comment. It wasn’t a competition, just a bad situation all around, and after treating and cataloging all of Jon’s myriad injuries, he didn’t feel like continuing along that track. It wouldn’t help anybody. It wouldn’t convince them that Jon was as much a victim in all this as they were. That he didn’t want this. Instead.
“He’ll be back in a few days. Or probably tomorrow, knowing him.”
“Wonderful.”
“Tim!” Martin pinched the bridge of his nose, already exasperated. “Tim, just. Go easy, alright?”
“Oh, I’ll go easy.” Full of grief and anger and heartbreak with nowhere for all of it to go, it had sharpened into a blade Tim wielded with deadly precision. Jon had been at the other end of it for a long time and despite his own frustrations with him, Martin wanted to shield him from the worst of it even if he knew he wouldn’t be able to. If Tim wanted to hurt Jon, he would, and it made him want to weep.
Sure enough and right on time, Jon dragged himself into the archives, mumbling a breathy ‘thank you’ to Martin as he passed by him to his office on new fawn’s legs. It didn’t escape his notice that he was still wearing the jumper, bundled up in it with his bandaged fingers tangled in the sleeves.
And work began again as though they’d never stopped.
Jon could have spent the next eternity wrapped up in bed, bundled in the comfort of Martin’s clothes and hiding from his very new and very real responsibilities. He ached, deeply, profoundly, in a million different ways, crushed by the weight of it all and barely able to breathe. Georgie was disappointed by his decision to go back to the institute but he had to do whatever he could to protect the rest of them, even if that meant playing into Elias’ hands until they came up with a solution together.
If they would have him back.
Reading the statements was going slow, too slow, the pounding in his head increasing whenever he tried to focus. Jon kept the lights low, avoiding the hallways with their cold fluorescent bulbs beaming down at him from above, bowing his back, trying to push him into the floor, keep him there like an insect pressed between pages and he would gladly succumb if it meant he could rest.
“Oi!” He jumped at the sharp voice, groaning when the stabbing hurt all over his body intensified.
“T’Tim?”
“‘Y’yeah.’” He mocked, tossing a stack of folders onto the already overflowing surface of the desk.
“What, what’re these?” Though his hands were shaking and sore, Jon picked up the pile, paging through distractedly.
“How the hell should I know. Martin said you asked for them.” He had?
“I don’t. I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
“Tch. Of course. Busy work to keep us preoccupied so we don’t have time to plot?”
“Wha--no, no!” It seemed his paranoia continued to have lasting consequences and he supposed it was only fair. “No, I wouldn’t. I. I’m sure I asked for them.” Reasonably sure, though for the life of him he couldn’t remember when. He couldn’t remember asking Martin but there was no reason for Tim to lie. Fingers snapping in front of his face jerked him back to the present.
“What’s wrong with you?” His eyes were narrowed and he was standing so close, too close, and suddenly Jon was on his feet, swaying into the wall and pushing past Tim in a desperate bid for the loo, head pounding enough to make him ill and only just making it in time to rid himself of the tea he didn’t remember drinking. Shaky, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaning back against the wall and willing the spinning to stop or slow or do anything that might make it less overwhelming. He washed his hands, his face, letting the cool water drip from his chin and closed his eyes against his reflection in the mirror. When he returned Tim was gone and Jon was thankful, tears prickling, threatening, as he sat back in his chair and rested his forehead on his folded arms for only a moment.
It was better in the stacks, dark and still, silent save for the rustling of statements and that didn’t make any sense at all even though something in the back of his mind insisted it did, encouraged him to pick one up and devour it. But the letters swam on the pages and his legs refused to hold him up any longer and he slid to the floor, hugging the folder to his chest and breathing in the stale scent of old, yellowing paper and ink. He felt so poorly, so tired, and he didn’t remember curling up on the floor but he must have, because he was, the statement still crushed in his arms like a safety blanket. How long had he been asleep? Getting up seemed too monumental a task and he let his eyes slip shut with a sigh, breathing through all the pain of his injuries.
Too much. This was all too much.
But it was quiet here among the boxes and envelopes, tucked with his back against the shelf grounding him, taking away some of that awful wooziness, the feeling of vertigo he hadn’t quite gotten rid of after his encounter with Mike Crew. He was safe here underground; underground was the opposite of up, the opposite of falling endlessly and he breathed in, out, slow, measured. Until his physical self seemed to drop away with everything else.
Plucked like a weed, Jon was lifted into the air, hauled up by his collar and set clumsily on his feet, pressed forcefully into the shelving. If it wasn’t for the hand at his throat (his throat, she was going to slice him open, bleed him like a game animal) he would have fallen and he was so scared of falling, no air in his lungs, just the deafening rush of it in his ears, so he scrabbled desperately, the statement fluttering away somewhere in favor of holding onto wrists attached to arms attached to shoulders attached to Tim. The world tilted on its axis, rolling like a ship at sea and he was desperately afraid of being released into that endless void.
“--Hiding down here?” How long had he been speaking? His face, features so twisted in revulsion of him he almost didn’t look like Tim, was close enough that he could feel his breath on his face. “Martin’s been worried sick looking for you!” Why was he yelling at him? He’d, he’d been here, not hiding, not doing anything. Just trying to, to, stay on the ground. Everything blacked out when Tim shook him roughly, shouting something else, and Jon didn’t know what he wanted, what would make him leave him alone, stop being so angry with him. He was going to be ill, too dizzy even when mercifully held still again and he was torn between letting go and taking his chances with Crew and sticking to Tim like a burr. But Tim made the decision for him, shaking him off, dropping him to his feet and shoving him forward and Jon knew he shrieked, shameful, loud, but he was falling, falling, falling and he hurt where he’d been pushed, like his bones were trying to make room by doing their level best to yank themselves free.
But he was plunging down, straight down, unmoored, unanchored, too much space, infinite space and nothing to grab to slow himself and he was going to fall forever and ever and ever and--
“Jon!”
No. He’d. How.
“Martin…” Whimpering, voice choked with tears, more of them streaming, pouring down his face, and he clung to Martin, solid, strong, holding him.
“Tim, what did you do?”
“M’falling...m’falling, Martin.” Clutching, clawing, he was going to hurt him if he wasn’t careful but he was too frightened, he had to be hurting him. Sobbing, selfish, stupid, and he couldn’t stop.
“You’re not, I’ve got you, Jon, I won’t let you fall.” Murmuring gently, embracing him tightly and it hurt, but he’d rather hurt than fall forever. “You’ve got to take a breath, Jon.” But all the air was rushing past him, too quickly to drink up even a sip, let alone breathe any into his seizing chest. “I’ve got you, try for me.” And he did, he would swear it, he’d try anything for Martin but he’d always failed in the most important tasks. He’d always failed the most important people.
At least he wasn’t falling anymore.
“Tim, what did you do?” Martin shifted Jon, passed out over his shoulder with bandaged fingers still tangled in his jumper and he was surprised he hadn’t torn it in his panic. Gently he pulled him into his lap, boiling with heat beneath his hands and heaving hard-won, gasping breaths.
“I--” He swallowed, shock naked in his expression. “I found him here, on the floor. Uh, pulled him up?” Tim raked his hair back. “I was rough, but. I didn’t mean.” Martin could only hope he looked as angry as he felt and Tim stopped speaking, following him to document storage like a lost puppy.
“Mm…” he held Jon tight, secure, relieved that he’d come around as quickly as he did even if he was groggy, setting him firmly on the cot, exerting pressure on his shoulders, an unspoken ‘I’m here, you’re here, no one is falling.’ He ducked his head, hiding from the light and groaning low.
“Jon, look at me.” He hadn’t noticed before, the black of his dilated pupils swallowed up by deep brown irises, but with the light, and his sensitivity to it, Martin suspected a head injury. “Jon?” Gently he tilted his face up with the tips of his fingers under his chin, trying to catch his dazed stare as it slipped over him like water over a stone.
“Hey! Stop ignoring him!” Jon flinched, hands clapping over his ears and curling even farther into himself while Martin glared. “Sorry.” Tim mumbled, arms crossed, leaning against the wall to give them some space.
“S’okay, Jon.” He inched closer. “Did you hit your head? Does your head hurt? Can I check?”
“Check?” Before Tim could do much more than scoff, Martin shushed him. If he wasn’t going to help, then it would be better for him to leave.
“Yep.” He didn’t wait for much more confirmation, just carefully reached forward under Jon’s wary gaze and buried his fingers in thick, unkempt curls, smiling softly when he leaned into the touch. Bolder, he cupped his face with his other hand, stroking along his cheek and watching his eyes drift closed with a hum. “Ah, oh, Jon.” Right at the back of his skull there was a large swelling, painful to the touch if Jon’s reaction was anything to go on. “Were you hit?”
“Hit?” Jon’s wrapped, burned fingers brushed against his own when he went to check for himself. “Daisy hit me.” Just a stated fact that chilled Martin to the bone and he watched his other hand come up to touch the column of his bandaged neck. “Daisy cut me.” He glanced back at Tim, trying to gauge his reaction, relieved to see horror blossoming in his expression and when he turned to Jon again, it was as if he was seeing Martin for the first time. “Martin?” He let his weight fall into his palm, and when his dark, damp eyes slipped shut, tears ran down his face. “Don’, don’think m’well.”
“Okay, it’s okay. I’ve--” his eyes flicked towards Tim. “We’ve got you.” Jon swallowed and Martin could feel it against his palm, literally holding his cut throat in his hands. "Can you tell us what's wrong?"
“Hur’s. Spin...falling, m’falling.” He paled, clutched at the linens, his breath shallow and fast and even Tim came forward in concern.
“I’ve got you, won’t let you go anywhere, Jon.” To Tim, “Don’t think he can tell which way is up. Vertigo? Concussion? We’ve got ice packs in the freezer yeah?”
“Anything else?”
“Ginger tea? If we have it.”
“M’tin…” He brushed stray curls back away from his forehead. “Stay? Please?”
“Of course I will.” Gentle and soft and Tim returned with tea and cold compresses quickly, passing off the mug to Martin, going so far as to sit beside Jon. “I’ve got to let go of you now.” And the look of panic and sorrow and resignation told him more about his state of mind than anything else.
Martin promised he would stay.
Martin was letting him go.
Jon was not surprised.
Just sad, so, so sad.
Prepared to be tossed aside.
“‘Course...s’sorry.” Another swallow, another and another, swallowing it down, how frightened he was, how lonely. Tears slipped over Jon’s skin, over Martin’s. “M’sorry, sorry.”
Too many.
Too much.
He watched Jon pull away, swaying, woozy, grip tightening on the sheets such that his knuckles were bone white. Alone again. Alone always. How dare he think or hope or dream otherwise.
“Got’chu, boss.” Martin waited until Tim had him ‘round the shoulders, pressing him into his sturdy side, before removing his hand and holding the mug to his lips.
“Drink this down and then some sleep, I think.” Together, they tipped him carefully sideways, grabbing his hands when they flew out to the side in an attempt to break a nonexistent fall, and Tim pressed a cold pack to the back of his neck, a shadow of a smile crossing his face when Jon relaxed into the pillow.
“You’re alright, boss. Won’t let you fall.”
#TMA#The magnus archives#jon sims#martin blackwood#tim stoker#strained relationships#sickfic#concussion#vertigo#Bad mental health#vomiting#Hurt/comfort
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Can’t Get Up- Prompt Fill
See I told you I did both! Cw dizziness, fainting, fever, head injuries, and canon typical being mean to Jon
Send me more prompts! (Bingo card by @celosiaa) The ones with stars are the ones I already have prompts for, the crossed out ones are the ones I have posted! Send me a character, a prompt, and tell me if you want an art or a fic!!!!!!
This one makes a Lot more sense if you read Too Much by @janekfan first, but do as you will, I think it can also stand alone.
The lingering fever left over from Jon’s (to Martin’s and Tim’s lack of information: mysterious and) hellish few days continued to do just that... linger.
Burned and bruised. Concussed and dizzy.
The fever was never overly dangerous, but it sapped Jon’s already basically nonexistent reserve of energy. And it just... lingered. Lingers.
It's better now that Tim and Jon had some sort of talk, but neither of them really know how they stand with the other.
Well, it is better for Jon because he has two people who give a shit if he collapses in the hall now. And better for Martin because one less person is going to actively try to hurt Jon. And better for Tim because he’s missed his friend. But it’s still awkward.
Tim watches Jon drag himself from the cot another morning. It was Tim that stayed with him last night, Martin's turn tonight. Jon is scared and confused and shouldn't be left alone. Not when he screams himself awake every couple hours. Not when gets so dizzy that he loses track of what he is meant to be doing.
Jon has been trying to push through. Trying to work. To make himself useful. To help save the world. To work himself into the ground so he doesn't think about how shitty everything has been for him.
Tim watches him drag himself up, and crumple right back down again. Tim managing to break his fall. Again. He should text Martin. He does text Martin.
Jon blinks up fuzzily at him after just a few seconds.
"Sorry," Jon slurs.
"Stop that," Tim says, not unkindly. Still trying to remember how to be kind with this fragile little man.
"I need... 'Sira need me to... I should get up." Jon is still struggling for words, eyes slipping closed, making no move to push himself from Tim's chest, where Tim has been pillowing him.
Jon might be asleep again. It's hard to tell. Tim presses a hand to Jon's forehead, confirming it still too warm, but not worse, and returns to his seemingly endless playing with Jon's hair.
It is still a bit before hours, so he doesn't expect Martin to appear the next moment, more like in the next half hour, depending on the crowds and the tube. But, when he hears footsteps approaching he feels relief, until he realizes those aren't Martin's footsteps. Too sharp. Still heavy, bit not heavy enough. Jon did mention needing to get something to Basira.
No one has... talked to Tim about his ....calling it a change of heart sounds stupid. He isn't going to call it that. He didn't have a change of heart, per se. He just realized he had his head up his ass and was honestly just as bad as Jon in some ways. Not to mention, he couldn't keep blaming Jon when Jon was basically just an unlucky punching bag, now with the added flavor or concussed and feverish.
"Right," says Basira, pushing open the door after a single, sharp knock. Pulling Jon from his uneasy sleep.
He scrambles upright. Too fast, sending him into a swoon for the second time in just a few minutes.
"Did you find those files? I need them if we want to actually stop the circus, and not just have a slumber party." There is clearly judgement in her eyes.
Tim, who caught Jon for the second time this morning, has an arm around him protectively.
Jon is coming around again. "Mmm wh'?" He forces his eyes open against the light Basira flipped on upon her entrance, eyes crossing as he tries to bring Basira into focus.
"Jon, look. We really don't have time for... whatever this is. Just get up and do something useful or just leave. And leave the rest of us to clean up this mess." It isn't that she is outright mean. Not like Daisy. Not hostile like Melanie. But cold. Which.... Tim shouldn't begrudge her for, but he wants to. Was she there when Jon was beaten? Tim's seen those bruises. Still dark and angry. Jon still cries out when handled roughly, or when handled gently but not gently enough.
Was she there? Was she complicit in this mess? And if she was... if she watched Jon get beaten by her partner. If she was one of the faces that stood over Jon while he dug a grave... and just waltzed back in here demanding Jon to help. Jon who can't even stay conscious... Who has been feverish and incoherent...
Who is she to do that?
Footsteps.
Martin.
Good. Tim doesn't know what to do. His instinct is to protect. To push away. To fight. But can he trust that instinct? When that's what he accused Jon of doing? What he, himself had done?
"Morning Basira, do you think I can get through? Jon's been a bit poorly and I rather doubt you looming over him is going to help."
Martin. God bless Martin.
She scowls but stands aside.
Martin, studiously ignores her.
Tim would rather like to kiss him.
Jon is still having trouble following the conversation. But he visibly brightens when Martin steps into view. Martin checks his temperature with the inside of his wrist. He tuts gently at Jon, who still seems too dizzy to sit up on his own.
"So...?" Basira. Reminding the three of them that she is, in fact there.
"Sorry," mumbles Jon, still barely coherent, and certainly not aware of what he was apologizing for this time. A reflex that makes Tim shudder.
"I'll do it myself." She turns on her heal and leaves. Shutting the door a bit too hardly, and Jon flinches.
"Hey, Jon. How are you feeling?" Tim scoots over as gently as he can so as not to jostle Jon too much. He makes room for Martin next to them.
Jon's eyes flicker closed again. Tim isn't sure if he's lost consciousness again or if he's just closed his eyes against the dizziness.
Martin watches with worry etched on is face. "How's he doing?"
Tim pulls a face. "Not worse, I don't think... but not better. Still getting nightmares. But he's passed out on me twice, though. Not sure what to do about that. Could be the vertigo, could be a panic response, could be the fever, hell it could be dehydration or hunger. We haven't gotten much food in him." Tim yawns. It has been a painfully long few days. And he's only gotten the chance to sleep every other night.
"Maybe... one of us should take him home?" Martin has lost some of that self confidence that he managed to put up around Basira. Probably because Tim know's Martin's flat wouldn't be comfortable for two or three people. Probably because Martin isn't sure just how far Tim is willing to be put out on Jon's behalf.
Then again. It is a bit too late not to be involved. Because Jon cannot seem to get up without passing out and so Tim has just been cuddling him for hours.
"I can take him to mine. I have more space." He offers a tired smile, sparing Martin the halting questions, and Tim the hurt of knowing he isn't fully trusted anymore. Not that he blames Martin for that. He made his bed, now he'll lay in it. Shit, did he make his bed? Well they are about to find out. "You call a cab, I'll see if I can wake him?"
Martin nods, and makes to do that. Exiting the room to spare Jon the extra volume.
"Hey Jon?" Tim runs his free hand through Jon's hair for a few moments. Watching Jon's eyes slowly flicker open.
"Mmmmm." Jon's bandaged hands holding on to his shirt. Too-warm forehead pressed against his chest.
"Is it alright if I take you home?"
"What 'bout work?" Jon's mouth barely able to form the words. Can't see straight enough to read anything.
"Bud, how exactly did you plan to do any work?"
Jon tries to focus his eyes. And his words. He only manages to squint slightly.
"We tried letting you work, but you aren't getting better, how about you take a couple days to get better, then you can come back and we can save the world? Besides. Shouldn't do work with a concussion. Don't want brain damage, do you?" Tim starts slowly easing Jon upright, only to have Jon's eyes roll back. Again. "Shit!"
"You both okay?" Martin's back. Good. Tim doesn't know what to do.
"Well I woke him up, but when I tried sitting him up, he fainted on me again."
Martin tuts again, and sits back next to them to check on Jon for himself. "Maybe we should move him while he's out to spare him the trip. The cab will be here soon."
Tim shrugs and slowly gets to his feet. Maneuvering Jon into a bridal carry as he does so. "Now we just gotta make sure that the cabbie doesn't think we are kidnapping him."
Matin flutters around, wanting to make sure the position will be comfortable enough for Jon when he eventually comes around. "It'll be fine. He should be conscious by then."
"Yeah and what do we say, our boss had a bit too much to drink at..." He searches for the wall clock. "9:30 in the morning."
"We say we're from the Magnus Institute, and they will ignore everything about us, Tim."
Tim... still needs to get used to this side of Martin. He kind of loves it when the bitterness isn't aimed at him.
Jon comes around again and they pass the others in the bullpen, clinging tightly to Tim's shirt until the sudden change of level of the stairs makes him dizzier and his head ache, if the small, fragile sounds he is making are any indication.
Martin is right. The cabbie doesn't a single question once he sees the building they are standing in front of.
Martin makes tea. Tim makes soup. And Jon is tucked tightly in Tim's bed for the first time in over a year.
#the magnus archives#fever#fainting#virtigo#concussions#jonmartim#jonmartin#jonathan sims#whump#tim stoker#timothy stoker#martin blackwood#basira hussain#tma#fic#words#my words#my fic#art#my art
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